New Takes in Film-Philosophy

New Takes in Film-Philosophy Also by Havi Carel ILLNESS LIFE AND DEATH IN FREUD AND HEIDEGGER WHAT PHILOSOPHY IS: CON...

Author: Greg Tuck | Havi Carel

87 downloads 1778 Views 883KB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

New Takes in Film-Philosophy

Also by Havi Carel ILLNESS LIFE AND DEATH IN FREUD AND HEIDEGGER WHAT PHILOSOPHY IS: CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY IN ACTION (co-edited with D. Gamez) Also by Greg Tuck NEO NOIR (co-edited with M. Bould and K. Glitre) PHILOSOPHY, CINEMA AND SEX

New Takes in Film-Philosophy Edited by

Havi Carel and

Greg Tuck

Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Havi Carel and Greg Tuck 2011 Individual chapters © Contributors 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–25028–4 ISBN 978–0–230–25029–1

hardback paperback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

This book is dedicated, with great love, to those we have lost and those we have gained whilst writing this book. Margaret Tuck (1925–2009) Solomon Carel Okasha (20 May 2009)

This page intentionally left blank

Contents Notes on Contributors

ix

Acknowledgements

xii

Introduction Havi Carel and Greg Tuck

1

Part I Deep Focus – Approaches to Film-Philosophy 1 On the Possibility of Cinematic Philosophy Thomas E. Wartenberg 2 Re-enfranchising Film: Towards a Romantic Film-Philosophy Robert Sinnerbrink 3 Notes on Stanley Cavell and Philosophical Film Criticism Andrew Klevan

9

25 48

4 Broken Glass by the Road: Adorno and a Cinema of Negativity Hamish Ford

65

5 Film Can’t Philosophise (and Neither Can Philosophy): Introduction to a Non-Philosophy of Cinema John Mullarkey

86

Part II Wide Angles – The Boundaries of Film-Philosophy 6 The Loom of Fate: Graphic Origins and Digital Ontology in Wanted Stephen Mulhall 7 Film, Literature and Non-Cognitive Affect Amy Coplan and Derek Matravers

103 117

8 Theory as Style: Adapting Crash via Baudrillard and Cronenberg Catherine Constable

135

9 The Ghost is the Machine: Media-Philosophy and Materialism Karin Littau

154

vii

viii Contents

10 Art, Cinema, Sex, Ontology: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the In-visible of Cinema Greg Tuck

171

Part III Directors Cut – Readings in Film-Philosophy 11 Fleshing Out the Image: Phenomenology, Pedagogy, and Derek Jarman’s Blue Vivian Sobchack 12 Serious Men: The Films of the Coen Brothers as Ethics Julian Baggini

191 207

13 A Bleak Burlesque: Michael Haneke’s Funny Games as a Study in Violence Andrew McGettigan

223

14 In the Grip of Grief: Epistemic Impotence and the Materiality of Mourning in Shinya Tsukamoto’s Vital Havi Carel

240

Index

256

Notes on Contributors Julian Baggini is a freelance journalist and author and the editor of The Philosopher’s Magazine. He is the author of numerous philosophy books, such as The Pig Who Wanted To Be Eaten, What Philosophers Think, Complaint, and What’s It All About? Havi Carel is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at UWE, Bristol. She is the author of Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger and of Illness and the coeditor of What Philosophy Is. She has published on film and philosophy in Scan, the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and in edited volumes. She is on the editorial board of Film-Philosophy.com. Catherine Constable is Associate Professor of Film & Television Studies at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Thinking in Images and Philosophy as Adaptation: Jean Baudrillard and The Matrix Trilogy. Amy Coplan is Assistant Professor at California State University Fullerton. She has published widely on film and philosophy and is the editor of one of Routledge’s Philosophers On Film series titles, Bladerunner. She is particularly interested in the philosophy of emotions, and the role of non-cognitive affect in understanding film. Hamish Ford is Lecturer in Film, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Newcastle (Australia) and the author of a number of publications on the relationship between cinema and philosophy, including ‘Difficult Relations: Film Studies and Continental European Philosophy’ in The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies (2008). His latest work charts cinema’s complex spatial and conceptual playing out of postcolonialism’s back-history and its troubled contemporary staging in a chapter entitled ‘From “Over There” to Virtual Presence: Camp de Thiaroye – The Battle of Algiers – Hidden’ (Postcolonial Cinema Studies, forthcoming). Andrew Klevan is University Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford. He is the author of Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film (2000) and Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation (2005). Karin Littau is Director of Research in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. She is the author of Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies, Bibliomania (2006) and Literature Before ix

x

Notes on Contributors

and After Film (forthcoming). She is also co-editor of several collections, including Inventions: Literature and Science (2005) and Cinematicity (2009) both for Comparative Critical Studies. Derek Matravers is Professor of Philosophy at The Open University and Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy in Cambridge. He has published extensively on the relation between art and the emotions, and is currently working on the psychological and philosophical aspects of reading. Andrew McGettigan is a Research Fellow at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design (University of the Arts London). He writes on film, the arts and contemporary electronic music. His most recent publications have focused on the concept of history in the work of Walter Benjamin. Stephen Mulhall teaches philosophy at New College, Oxford. He has written extensively on the work of Stanley Cavell, an interest which inspired his 2002 book On film. John Mullarkey is Professor of Film and Television at Kingston University, London. He is the author of Bergson and Philosophy (1999), Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (2006) and Philosophy and the Moving Image: Refractions of Reality (2010) and is Editor of FilmPhilosophy. He is currently working on a book–film project dealing with the representations of animals in film and philosophy. Robert Sinnerbrink is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Macquarie University, Sydney. He is the author of Understanding Hegelianism (2007), co-editor of Critique Today (2006), and is a member of the editorial board of the online journal Film-Philosophy. He has published numerous articles on the film-philosophy relationship, including essays on the work of David Lynch, Terrence Malick, and Lars von Trier. His next book, New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images (forthcoming), examines contemporary approaches to the philosophy of film and explores new ways of thinking the film-philosophy relationship. Vivian Sobchack is Professor Emeritus of Critical Media Studies in the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media at UCLA. Her books include Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (1980, expanded 1997), The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (1992), and Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (2004). She has also edited two anthologies: The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event (1996) and Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick Change (2000).

Notes on Contributors xi

Greg Tuck is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at UWE, Bristol. He is the co-editor of Neonoir (2009) and is currently writing a monograph entitled Philosophy, Cinema and Sex (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). He is on the editorial board of Film-Philosophy.com. Thomas E. Wartenberg is Professor of Philosophy at Mount Holyoke College. He is the author of Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy (2007) and Unlikely Couples: Movie Romance as Social Criticism (1999). He has also co-edited three anthologies on film and philosophy, the most recent being, Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy (2006).

Acknowledgements We would like to thank a number of people who have helped this book come to life. Our thanks go to Jeremy Dunham, who kindly read through the entire manuscript and made useful suggestions. We thank the contributors who wrote thoughtful and challenging pieces. Thanks also to Palgrave Macmillan’s anonymous reviewers (you know who you are!) who recommended this project should go ahead. We are very grateful to the Faculty of Creative Arts and the Faculty of Social Science and Humanities at UWE, Bristol, who provided funding for editorial assistance. We thank Christabel Scaife, the Film Studies list editor at Palgrave Macmillan, for her support and enthusiasm for this project as well as Felicity Plester, who took over as list editor. And finally, our thanks go to Catherine Mitchell and Renee Takken at Palgrave Macmillan who encouraged and assisted the project along the way, providing practical support and useful suggestions. We would also like to thank our partners, Susan Alexander and Samir Okasha, for their love and support and for watching films they never would have otherwise. We would also like to thank the copy-editor, Ann Marangos, for her meticulous and patient work on this volume.

xii

Introduction Havi Carel and Greg Tuck

Film studies scholars have always drawn on philosophical ideas. Philosophers, and in particular those working on aesthetics and philosophy of art, have been interested in cinema for as long as it has existed. However, the last few years has seen the emergence of extraordinary interest in the conjunction of film and philosophy. This is not to say that it is a welldefined field of enquiry or one that has broad agreement amongst its practitioners on what exactly it is and what it should be doing. Is it a name for a type of philosophical sub-discipline, the identification of an object of philosophical enquiry, or illustration? Is it a reorientation or a methodological approach to the study of film, a new way of doing ‘film studies’? Is it really, in even the most porous and provisional sense of the term, a ‘discipline’? And is it the same sort of practice regardless of which side of the conjunction one originates from? In addition, both film studies and philosophy are themselves heterogeneous practices, divided between radically different conceptions of what ‘counts’ as legitimate modes of study. Thus the conjunction becomes even harder to define. So why bother with it? What is to be gained from asking the question ‘what is film-philosophy’? Disciplinary boundaries are both productive and limiting, a necessary guard against simplification and generality, as well as self-serving barricades that protect the status quo. Hence studies that attempt interdisciplinarity have their own special rewards and dangers. At their best they can introduce concepts and modes of analysis from one discipline and apply them to another, refreshing seemingly tired or well-worn ideas. At their worst they can seem ill-considered impositions which overlook well-established and subtly structured modes of thought, producing inappropriate applications and unproductive unions. When considering film and philosophy, the philosopher’s first question is: ‘are such mass cultural products philosophically productive?’. 1

2

Introduction

And if so, what is it about films rather than other aspects of culture (gardening, football, soap operas) that makes it a worthy site of attention? The film studies scholar may ask, given that as a discipline film studies has been influenced by a broad range of humanities and social sciences disciplines, what is to be gained by limiting its theoretical resources to a single area, namely philosophy? While there are studies that describe themselves, perfectly legitimately, as exercises in the philosophy of film, in these cases film is clearly positioned as the junior partner. Film here is the object of study and as such is reduced to a thing placed under a pre-existing and fully-developed philosophical gaze, rather than seen as a more troubling site of thought and experience in its own right, one which has equal potential to expose the problems and limitations of a given philosophical method. Similarly, while offering more equality between the terms, the conjunction ‘film and philosophy’ still suggests a pre-existing demarcation between the fields. In some cases the discipline of film studies seems to be ignored or sidelined. As a consequence, film tends to be reduced to a single ‘object’ (the individual film), shorn of its wider historical and cultural articulation and its reliance on the complex institution we call ‘cinema’. Under such circumstances, the film risks being reduced further to a set of notions or concerns that could have been identified from the script, rather than issues that arise from an engagement with the visual, aural and kinetic experience of moving images. The uptake of philosophical ideas within film studies has itself not been without problems. Sometimes the adoption of certain philosophical positions can look rather piecemeal and contingent. Consequently, philosophical differences tend to get magnified and the so-called divide between analytic and continental traditions, which is increasingly traversed, or even seen as irrelevant in much contemporary philosophy, remains championed by many in film studies. Yet beyond this particular binary of a successful or failed assimilation there is another possibility for such conjunctions: a revitalising hybridity that aims at a more truly synthesising outcome. Here the conjunction is less a boundary, traversed from one side to the other more or less successfully, but a moment of expansion in which a field of thought becomes mapped and nourished by both traditions. The boundary is not so much crossed, as expanded, broadened so as to become a terrain of its own. To keep open the possibility of mutual transformation while offering a coherent yet non-excluding notion of what this new terrain may yield, we describe this domain as film-philosophy. As will become apparent, even this more open and provisional description of the conjunction does not preclude disagreement among our

New Takes in Film-Philosophy 3

contributors, who engage in a variety of differing film-philosophical endeavours. But this lack of agreement is what, in part, contributes to the area’s richness, as we hope readers of this volume will agree. At the same time, the collection has not been set up as an adversarial relation between these different approaches. While critiques are both mounted and defended against a range of philosophical positions, what unites these contributions is a desire to map out a practice, a variety of ways of doing film-philosophy that is mutually informative to both philosophy and film studies. Hence readers will discover how cognitivist film theorists appeal to philosophy of mind and perception and even to neuroscience to analyse the experience of film viewing, alongside a range of more traditional aesthetic or phenomenological descriptions of the film experience. Some chapters demonstrate a direct engagement with a named philosopher such as Cavell, Adorno or Merleau-Ponty while others develop a more synthesised approach in which themes and questions, rather than method, dominate. Our aim is to open up, rather than close down, debate and to allow readers to make their own judgements on which of these approaches seem the most suitable for their purposes. While some contributors remain cautious, others are more optimistic about the future of film-philosophy. Nonetheless, they are all prepared to consider not only what philosophy can bring to our understanding of film, but also what film can bring to our understanding of philosophy. How can an understanding of film as an individual text, aesthetic tradition, and social and historical practice help us to broaden our understanding of philosophical activity as going beyond the written and spoken word? Does this practice transform our views of what philosophy is? What does a more philosophical consideration of the medium-specificity of motion pictures (if indeed such a hybrid art form can be said to have one) add to our understanding of film? These are some of the issues that are discussed in this book. The collection is presented in three parts. Part I offers general overviews and speculation about what the conjunction can achieve. Part II discusses the boundaries of film-philosophy and its relation to other media. Part III delivers more particular readings of individual films or filmmakers.

Part I Deep Focus: Approaches to Film-Philosophy The collection opens with Thomas E. Wartenberg’s careful consideration of what film can achieve philosophically. He outlines what he calls the moderate pro-cinematic philosophy position, which defends the view that film can creatively be used to illustrate philosophical ideas, but it

4

Introduction

can also be used for more than this. Specifically, film can be used as a thought experiment, or in the case of avant-garde cinema to perform its own aesthetic experiments. Next, Robert Sinnerbrink develops what he refers to as a romantic film-philosophy, one which claims film as its own mode of philosophical presentation. In much the same way that poetry’s capacity to deploy language in its own provocative and evocative ways challenges the primacy of prose, the multi-sensuous experience of cinema opens up profound new ways of thinking that philosophy can learn from. Andrew Klevan’s sustained engagement with Stanley Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein produces a generous and affirmative understanding of the collective pleasures of cinema. Klevan outlines the rewards of careful spectatorship, revealing a medium capable of discovering, investigating and returning to the profound significance of what might at first appear inconsequential and ordinary moments. In direct contrast to this sense of appreciation, Hamish Ford engages with the thought of Theodor Adorno to produce a far more austere reading of the failure of art in general and cinema in particular to transcend its material conditions of existence. However, in the bleak social analysis offered by some of the most challenging examples of European Art cinema, Ford maps a confrontation with negativity that is not entirely without hope. In the final chapter of this part John Mullarkey engages with the thought of François Laruelle to radically question not only film’s capacity to philosophise, but philosophy’s ability to escape from its own modes of idealism and representational thought that predetermine its analysis. Film’s failure to capture what we call reality is illustrative of a wider philosophical failure; one which cannot be overcome but is lived with through a more pluralist approach to what is philosophically or artistically productive.

Part II Wide Angles: The Boundaries of Film-Philosophy The second part of the collection addresses the issue of mediumspecificity and materiality of cinema in order to investigate its similarity to and difference from other art forms. It begins with Stephen Mulhall’s chapter on Wanted (Timur Bekmambetov, US/Germany, 2008) a film that reflects many of the issues raised by contemporary cinema based as it is on a graphic novel and heavily reliant on digital technology and special effects. Mulhall’s close reading not only raises profound questions as to the status of cinematic ontology in the digital age but also opens up wider philosophical considerations regarding the definition of the real itself. The next chapter presents a debate between Amy Coplan

New Takes in Film-Philosophy 5

and Derek Matravers on the immediacy of cinema and its capacity to produce affect and how this affect relates to emotional response. While both are sympathetic to much contemporary cognitive film theory, Coplan wonders to what extent film produces a more immediate, noncognitive affect, a question which itself raises important issues regarding the limits of the cognitive. Matravers responds by questioning whether such affects are unique to cinema or are equally, or even better produced, through our engagement with literature. Catherine Constable continues this consideration of cinema’s relation to writing by widening it to include philosophy itself as a written practice. More specifically she compares David Croneberg’s cinematic treatment of J. G. Ballard’s novel Crash with Jean Baudrillard’s philosophical one, in order to examine to what extent style, both in written and cinematic form, is a mode of philosophy. Karin Littau considers the materiality of the printed word in relation to the cinematic image to remind us of the vital role media history has to play in our conceptualising of filmphilosophy. In the final chapter Greg Tuck continues to consider both the aesthetic and historic boundaries of film through an examination of Early Cinema’s relation to painting.

Part III Directors Cut: Readings in Film-Philosophy While our final section continues to raise a range of issues about film-philosophy, what marks it out is a deep engagement with the intentions and techniques of a particular filmmaker. We begin with Vivian Sobchack’s reading of Derek Jarman’s Blue (UK, 1993). Despite the supposed simplicity of the image, Sobchack reveals the perceptive density and performativity contained in the experience offered by this film. By holding back on the urge to interpret and judge, instead attending to what we actually perceive, she uses the film to present a sophisticated phenomenological pedagogy in which the primacy of embodiment to the cinematic experience challenges its reduction to a cognitively informing domain. Her chapter is followed by Julian Baggini’s analysis of the moral universe opened up by the films of the Coen brothers. In films such as No Country for Old Men (US, 2007) and Burn After Reading (US, 2008), Baggini identifes a recognisable human world that develops a philosophically vital analysis regarding the ethical as more effective when concerned with keeping our baser instincts in check than in offering models of moral perfection. While excited by the possibility of film’s contribution to such debates, Baggini is also keen to outline what he feels are its limits.

6

Introduction

The moral and ethical theme is continued by Andrew McGettigan’s analysis of Michael Haneke’s two versions of Funny Games (Austria, 1997 & US, 2007). Here it is not just the thematic but formal presentation of moral behaviour that comes under examination, not least in the question to what extent Haneke manages to represent our capacity for violence in ways that truly open new ways of thinking about it. For McGettigan the problem of avoiding cliché or worse, succumbing to the irrational pleasures of violent imagery, is overcome by Hanake’s counter-aesthetic that encourages reflection rather than identification. In the final chapter Havi Carel discusses Shinya Tsukamoto’s Vital (Japan, 2004) as an example of how film can materialise complex emotional experiences such as grief and mourning. Carel demonstrates that the existential issues raised by the narrative, not least what it is that gives life and animation to the human body, are echoed and in part answered by the form of the film and by Tsukamoto’s aesthetic choices. While clearly offering a broad range of opinions and approaches to film-philosophy, what all of these contributions share is a profound belief in the value of the conjunction for both disciplines. In a world more and more dominated by mediating technologies of the audiovisual, it is almost a duty of philosophy to engage with cinema. Film studies has much to offer philosophy in this respect, reminding it to examine the wider significance of the cinematic experience and not to succumb to the temptations of ‘script’ philosophy or limiting its engagements to films it can more easily identify as ‘art’ and therefore subsume under existing aesthetic models. It is what films do that is different from existing art that requires most attention. Film studies, too, is enriched by the conjunction, not least by being made aware of its own philosophical underpinnings and the need to both broaden and strengthen them. The practice of film-philosophy is not limited to debates in aesthetics and philosophy of art, but also reinvigorates contemporary debates in epistemology, metaphysics, politics and ethics, as this collection demonstrates. It can serve to push philosophy to confront its residual iconoclasm that makes some of its practitioners fearful of images and the imaginary as well as demand a more rigorous approach to the uptake of the philosophical canon by film studies. Together they demonstrate that however uncanny the view of Plato’s cave as a metaphor for cinema seems, it is clear that the movies offer far more than illusion.

Part I Deep Focus – Approaches to Film-Philosophy


1 On the Possibility of Cinematic Philosophy Thomas E. Wartenberg

For some years now, there has been an active debate about the possibility of what I am calling ‘cinematic philosophy’. By that term, I refer to philosophy that is done on, in, or through film. I believe this to be a neutral way in which to indicate the sort of phenomenon that is also called ‘film-philosophy’ (see this volume), ‘film-as-philosophy’ (Smith and Wartenberg, 2006), and ‘filmosophy’ (Frampton, 2006). In this chapter, I present a typology of the basic positions that have been staked out in the debate on the possibility of cinematic philosophy. My goal in doing so is to clarify the basic issues that stand in contention in this discussion. But I also intend this typology to serve as an introduction to my own position on the question of cinematic philosophy’s possibility, a position that I develop and defend in my recent book, Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy (Wartenberg, 2007). So my presentation of the typology is anything but disinterested: I hope that the typology will function, at least in part, to support my argument for taking films to be capable of actually doing or being philosophy, the basic claim I seek to establish in my book. In what follows, I will call this the ‘cinematic philosophy thesis’ (CPT for short). Before I begin my presentation of that typology, I want to clear up one confusion that has beset the discussion of cinematic philosophy. That confusion is the result of some of the advocates for the possibility of cinematic philosophy, myself included, articulating their view by claiming that films have the capacity to actually do philosophy. Some critics have objected to this claim on the grounds that films cannot do philosophy, for only people can do philosophy. But this objection, despite mimicking a catchy advertising phrase, misses the point: When I and others support the possibility of cinematic philosophy by claiming that some films actually do philosophy, that is a shorthand way 9

10

Deep Focus – Approaches to Film-Philosophy

of saying that some filmmakers have philosophized by means of their films, so that philosophy has been done in, on, or through film, just as it can be done, of course, has been done by having a conversation, by presenting a paper, or by writing a book or an article. Now, there is a version of the CPT that makes it appear trivial and uninteresting. It is the sort of thing that has been characterized as the presence of explicit philosophy in film (Eldridge, 2009, p. 109). The idea is that it is possible for a film to record someone orally doing what we standardly think of as philosophy, say by giving a lecture or teaching a class on a subject that is widely accepted as philosophical. Think, for example, of a video recording of Saul Kripke explaining the nature of rigid designation. This is the sort of thing you might come across on YouTube. Clearly, this hypothetical video would show us philosophy being done. Why doesn’t this settle the question of whether philosophy can be done cinematically? Before answering this question, I want to express my surprise that no one who has discussed this issue has, to my knowledge, referred to actual examples of standard modes of doing philosophy being recorded in a film, preferring to present their own favorite thought experiment, such as mine about Kripke, to capture this possibility.1 But Bernardo Bertolucci’s film The Conformist (Il Conformista, Italy, 1970) is one example of a film that contains a character actually making a philosophical argument. The Conformist includes a lengthy recitation of Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’ by its protagonist, Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant). Clerici appears to be quoting a lecture given by his former professor, now in exile, Luca Quadri (Enzo Tarascio), in which Quadri presented Plato’s ‘Allegory’. Although there is more to this sequence than a simple invocation of Plato’s ‘Allegory’ – its use of lighting is truly spectacular as it transforms the former professor’s study into a version of the very scene of the cave being described, thereby lending plausibility to Quadri’s claim that Clerici is himself in the position of the cave’s prisoners – it is at the very least an instance of ‘philosophy in film’ in the sense I have just specified, for it presents someone reciting Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’, a piece of philosophizing to be found in Plato’s Republic (1992, 514a–520a). Richard Linklatter’s 2001 film Waking Life (USA) is another, even more pertinent example of philosophy in film, for the film includes the contemporary philosophers Robert Solomon and Louis Mackey presenting their own views on a variety of philosophical topics, not merely reciting portions of previously written texts. Even though the film’s use of a rotoscope means it is not simply a photographic record of a lecture or conversation, it still counts as an

On the Possibility of Cinematic Philosophy 11

example of philosophy being presented in film in the technical sense we have been using here. It turns out not to be so easy to specify why these examples do not settle the debate about cinematic philosophy, despite the fact, widely acknowledged by the participants in the debate about cinematic philosophy, that it is not. Part of the problem is that film is here being reduced to a recording device, and an auditory recording device at that. What is recorded is a person doing philosophy, but the film itself is not responsible for the philosophy getting done, is not the site at which the philosophizing is taking place. What stands in contention between the advocates and critics of the CPT is whether film and its related media are capable of being the original site at, on, in, or through which philosophy is done. I would also like to look at another uncontroversial way in which a film can do philosophy that similarly does not settle the CPT debate. A documentary film can do philosophy by presenting an explicit argument in its soundtrack that it supports by means of images presented on its visual track. Although there may be some skepticism about a film’s visual track providing adequate evidence for a philosophical position, I will simply bypass this question as a side issue that is not relevant to the main contention of the CPT. So what, then, is the central issue between the various different parties who have been discussing whether films can do philosophy? The question is whether a film is able to actually do philosophy other than in one of the explicit ways I have just mentioned. And although the bulk of the discussion has focused on fiction films, it is important to realize that this question also makes sense in relation to certain types of avant-garde film, as I shall show presently. As I see it, there are four distinct positions than have been taken on this issue. An awareness of the structure of these options will help explain the way in which I approach the question of cinematic philosophy in my book as well as the course taken by the discussion of this question among philosophers and film theorists in recent years. The first option is the extreme anti-cinematic philosophy position (EACP). At this point in the history of philosophy, I think that no one can deny that films bear some important relationship to philosophy; the question is exactly what that relationship is or can be. After all, the number of articles and books, journals and conferences about philosophical issues present in film continues to grow at an amazing rate. In the face of this ongoing development, the EACP maintains that films can only have pedagogical or heuristic interest for philosophers.

12


So while a philosophy professor might find it useful to screen The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, USA, 1999) to introduce students to radical skepticism about knowledge of the external world, an advocate of EACP would argue that films can have no further philosophical interest than such pedagogical ones. The reasons given for adopting this position vary, but generally have to do with a supposedly inherent distinction between film and philosophy as intellectual endeavors. Murray Smith (2006) and Paisley Livingston (2006) have each advocated this position. Smith has argued that films, and art works more generally, have a very different character than philosophy, so that even the presence of similar tropes in each of them will have a different function. Thus, he argues, for example, that ambiguity is a virtue of literary texts, but a defect in philosophical ones. He takes this to indicate that films and philosophy are practices structured around different aims, so that it is a mistake to treat films as having real philosophical potential. While Smith may be right about the overarching goals of film and philosophy, I don’t see that his claim shows why a filmmaker cannot have a philosophical aim in mind in making a specific film and why this cannot be part of what she intends to accomplish in making the film. Sure, filmmakers in general have to worry about the market value of their works in a way that philosophers writing in professional journals do not. But I do not see why that difference entails a deficit in film’s philosophical capacities. Making a philosophically significant film could be part of what a filmmaker is attempting to do, although she cannot completely neglect other interests, such as engaging her audience. Livingston’s argument for EACP employs a different strategy. He presents a dilemma to those who advocate a certain version of the CPT that he calls ‘the bold thesis’. The proponents of the bold thesis, according to Livingston, hold that film has a unique ability to present certain philosophic ideas.2 Livingston asks the bold thesis advocate whether this supposed contribution to philosophy can be paraphrased. If it can, then the bold thesis will have been shown to be false, for the paraphrase must also count as a contribution to philosophy; if it can’t be, then the film cannot have made a contribution to the field of philosophy which is, after all, cognitive and, hence, must be capable of explicit formulation. Having purportedly shown the incoherence of the bold thesis, Livingston proclaims that films can only be of heuristic interest to philosophers. Leaving aside the question of whether Livingston has presented a real dilemma for advocates of the bold thesis, I maintain that there


are many options on the table other than the two Livingston presents. Indeed, one of the reasons I have for developing my own typology is to show that, even if Livingston’s argument is sound, that does not show that there are no options for specifying film’s potential contribution to philosophy other than the pedagogic and heuristic ones Livingston acknowledges. One can agree with Livingston that film’s contributions to philosophy do not depend on any unique characteristic that the medium has without being driven into the corner of limiting film’s philosophical uses to the merely pedagogic and heuristic. At the opposite pole stands the extreme pro-cinematic philosophy position (EPCP). This position claims that film is able to contribute to the very project of philosophy, however that may be conceived, as fundamentally as can written texts and oral discussion. Put another way, advocates of this position think that film offers another medium for doing philosophy, in addition to the more traditional linguistic media of conversation and writing. Philosophers who accept the EPCP tend do think that there is something inherent in film as an artistic medium that links it closely to the project of philosophy as traditionally conceived. The advocates of this position seem to be the ones Livingston intends to target with his purported dilemma. The two philosophers who I take to be advocating a version of this position are Stanley Cavell (2004) and Stephen Mulhall (2008). I will focus here on Mulhall’s recent characterization of this view that he acknowledges was derived from Cavell. He asserts that there are two ways in which films embody philosophical thinking: First, films can deal with philosophical issues in the same way that philosophers to. His example is the Alien films (1979–97), which he takes to deal with issues of ‘sexuality, embodiment, and procreation’, in a philosophical manner (Mulhall, 2008, p. 132). Second, Mulhall asserts that ‘film exists in the state of philosophy’, by which he means that film exhibits the same self-reflexive concern about its own possibility as a cultural form that he takes to be characteristic of philosophy. His example of such selfreflexivity is, once again, drawn from the Alien films, which he claims exhibit a philosophical concern with the nature of sequeldom. Now Mulhall has a certain aversion to theoretical discussions such as the one I am here immersed in, for reasons that I can only partly fathom. Nonetheless, I shall persevere and admit that I have reservations about both of his claims or, at least, his use of them. First, I don’t see why it makes sense to claim of a film that it has made a contribution to the philosophical discussion of an issue simply because it takes that issue as one of its themes. As Smith (2006) has argued, both films

14


and philosophy may raise issues of personal identity, but that doesn’t mean that the film has thereby actually contributed to the philosophical discussion of that issue. Smith contends that, although All of Me (Carl Reiner, USA, 1984) relies on the idea that a person’s mind might come to occupy another’s body, it does not do so in order to settle the philosophical issue of personal identity but for comic purposes. If we accept Smith’s claim, then Mulhall’s assertion that films like those in the Alien tetralogy raise philosophical issues does not show that they are thereby necessarily doing philosophy rather than, for example, merely seeking to keep us entertained by means of introducing such curious, yet philosophically relevant possibilities. Second, although I agree with Mulhall that some films do raise the question of their own nature in a philosophical manner, I once again think that he has not substantiated his claim that the Alien films do so. Sure, a film that is a sequel to a well-known and popular film is likely to make some reference to its predecessor. But I don’t see why that reference constitutes a contribution to our specifically philosophical understanding of film or, more specifically, what is involved in one film being a sequel to another. It is not the claim that Mulhall makes but his failure to provide an adequate justification for it that I am criticizing. Nonetheless, Mulhall is right about one thing: The question of whether films can make contributions to philosophy and what precisely those contributions are cannot be settled in the absence of careful discussions and analyses of specific interpretations of films that attribute philosophical content to those films. I share his rejection of a priori arguments about film’s philosophical incapacities as well as his affirmation of the need to pay attention to the specific interpretations of films that philosophers such as he and I have given in which we claim that films are actually doing philosophy. Still, I do think that there are some things that can be said in general about film’s philosophical potential. For one thing, I think it is a mistake to think that films can do everything that can be done in the more traditional philosophical media using oral or written language. To deny this is to obscure the distinctive nature of philosophy as an intellectual discipline, some of whose features and concerns cannot be replicated cinematically. To see this, consider one example of philosophical progress, namely the demonstration that a conceptual distinction that previous philosophers had taken to be adequate for discussing an issue contains an important ambiguity. I take this to have been the case when Kant showed that both the rationalists and the empiricists had conflated an epistemic distinction – the a priori/a posteriori


distinction – with a semantic one – the analytic/synthetic one (Kant, 1933). Some of the most important advances in philosophical thinking involve just this sort of conceptual clarification, but offhand I just don’t see how a film might be able to do something similar. I might be wrong about this specific example, but it is just one instance of a philosophical claim for which there is no obvious path onto film. So this is one of the reasons that I reject the EPCP. Let me now turn to the moderate anti-cinematic philosophy position (MACP). This view relies on something like the claim I have just made about film’s philosophical (in)capacities. The MACP holds that, even though films have certain philosophically significant capabilities, there are many aspects of philosophy that film cannot embody. What’s significant about this position is its acknowledgment that films can do some of the things that can be done in the more traditional philosophical media, such as presenting a counterexample to a philosophical thesis. There is nothing about film as a medium, it asserts, that precludes it from doing philosophy, but there are very clear and significant limitations, it also maintains, to what cinema can do philosophically. Bruce Russell has developed this position in a series of articles on what he terms ‘film’s limits’ (Russell, 2000, 2008, 2009). Russell’s position is that that there are certain aspects of philosophy that can be replicated cinematically. Films can, he says, ‘raise philosophical questions, offer counterexamples to putative necessary truths, remind us of what we already know, and motivate us to find out what we don’t know, or reconsider what we think we know’. However, that, according to Russell, is as far as their contribution to philosophy goes (Russell, 2008, p. 1). Aside from these very specific possibilities, film cannot do anything that counts as philosophy. In particular, an MACP advocate like Russell denies that films can advance a philosophical position or make a philosophical argument. I have three concerns about the MACP position. First, I am puzzled by the manner in which it presents itself. It acknowledges a range of different things that films can do philosophically but then goes on to deny that there can be any other additions to the list. As a result, it claims that there are very definite limits to what films can contribute to philosophy. What I don’t understand is why the advocates of this position choose to characterize it as establishing limits to film’s philosophical significance rather than as demonstrating the philosophical potential of film, showing some of the things that films can do. What is the argument that demonstrates the validity of the line it draws in the sand – This and no more?

16


Second, it is just this attempt to establish such a fast, rigid, and a priori boundary that shows the limits of film’s philosophical capabilities that I find problematic.3 I do not disagree with the assertion that films cannot replicate many of the features of the practice of philosophy, as I have already explicitly acknowledged. But I think we need to take a more experimental, pragmatic, somewhat tentative attitude in regard to what those features might be, rather than to make a priori claims about what they must be. (Let me emphasize that I say this despite having just given one example of a philosophical feature that I do not see film as being able to replicate.) My third issue with the MACP position is that, on the one hand, it admits that films can present counterexamples to well-known philosophical theories, but denies that films can do anything more, such as present a positive argument. But counterexamples are themselves arguments, even if enthymemic ones. That is, a counterexample involves both a scenario and an application of that scenario to show the inadequacy of a general philosophical claim. Consider Plato’s (1992) well-known counterexample to the thesis that justice is giving each his due. Basically, it consists of asking the person who proposed the thesis whether he thinks that returning a gun to a person who has gone mad is the just or right thing to do. This counterexample can be reconstructed as follows: 1 Justice (what is right) is giving each person his due. (Thesis to be counterexampled) 2 Returning a gun to a person who has gone made is giving that person that which is due him. (Accepted from story) 3 Giving a gun to a mad person is not the right thing to do. (Accepted from story) 4 Justice is not adequately defined as giving each person his due. (Resolution of contradiction between 1, 2, and 3.) Since the advocates of MACP admit that films can present counterexamples, they seem to thereby admit that films can present one specific type of argument. So what grounds do they have for denying that films can present arguments in general? I now turn to the last of the four positions on the possibility of cinematic philosophy and the one that I endorse: the moderate pro-cinematic philosophy position (MPCP). This position views film as a medium that can be used for significant philosophical purposes, even though it agrees with some of the anti-cinematic philosophy critics that there are


limits to the sorts of philosophical things that films can do. It rejects the MACP’s attempt to draw clear and fast boundaries to what can be accomplished philosophically on film. It holds that the question of what films can do philosophically remains an open empirical question whose answer will depend on the future development of film as well as the attention paid to it by philosophers.4 The structure of Thinking On Screen owes a great deal to my understanding that these are the basic positions on the question of the possibility of cinematic philosophy. Given the stark attacks on the very possibility of cinematic philosophy by the EACP advocates and strong assertions about what film can accomplish philosophically from the EPCP advocates, I decided that it was important to adopt an argumentative strategy that I would describe as moderately conservative, in order to share as much ground as possible with all the participants in this debate. What I hoped to thereby achieve was a definitive account of at least a few ways in which philosophy could be done cinematically or, as I put it in the book, on screen. In so doing, I also intended to show that film’s philosophical reach exceeded the limits that advocates of MACP had specified. Let me characterize the three modes of cinematic philosophy that I highlight in Thinking on Screen. The first way in which a film can do philosophy is by illustrating a philosophical position or theory. Virtually everyone writing on the possibility of cinematic philosophy, no matter what theoretical position they endorse, has admitted that films have this capacity while denigrating films that ‘merely’ illustrate a philosophical theory as not being genuine instances of cinematic philosophy (See, for example, Mulhall [2008]). This seemed like a mistake to me or, at least, an unargued for assumption. So I presented a deconstruction of the ‘illustration/genuine philosophy’ distinction and then argued that a cinematic illustration could be doing real philosophy. Richard Eldridge’s (2009, p. 110) distinction between a cartoonish and an interpretive illustration is helpful here, for it is the latter that I tried to argue should count as genuine instances of cinematic philosophy. I think that it is clear that there are increasingly more films that develop such interpretive illustrations of philosophical positions and that these should be credited with doing philosophy, just as we credit the historian of philosophy with doing philosophy when she comes up with a new interpretation of an important philosopher’s views. To see this, consider for a moment Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, USA, 2004). In addition to doing some other things philosophically, the film is a superb and highly imaginative interpretive

18


illustration of Nietzsche’s theory or conjecture of the eternal recurrence of the same, one that shows exactly what Nietzsche intends our acceptance of that idea to accomplish, namely to foster the realization that even the most painful features of our lives are part of our own identities, things that we must be able to will, to acknowledge as if chosen (Nietzsche, 1978). At the end of Eternal Sunshine, the film’s two main characters decide to embark upon their love affair despite knowing that, in all likelihood, it will turn out traumatically for them, because they have discovered that that is what happened in the past. In so doing, they act in exactly the way Nietzsche intended with his graphic theory: affirming even the most painful aspects of our lives as ones that we can affirm as objects of our conscious choice.5 This amounts to the film’s doing philosophy, I think, because the film has presented Nietzsche’s theory in a way that makes it plausible in our contemporary context and this is, I think, a philosophical as well as a cinematic achievement. Similarly, I would characterize Mulhall’s (2008) discussion of Alien (Ridley Scott, USA, 1979) as interpreting the film as an illustration of Darwinianism, although Mulhall might balk at this claim since he rejects the idea that cinematic illustrations of philosophy count as genuine instances of philosophy on screen. So both of these films need to be recognized as philosophical as well as cinematic achievements precisely because they are not cartoonish but rather interpretive illustrations of the philosophical positions or theories they illustrate. In Thinking on Screen, I also argue that a second way in which fiction films do philosophy is by presenting philosophical thought experiments. The idea here is that of some fiction films present us with imaginary worlds that play the same role as those conjured by the narratives of thought experiments that philosophical texts are replete with from Plato’s onwards. And, in so far as the films embody this philosophical technique, they count as doing philosophy. To see why this is so, we need to first understand what a thought experiment is. In recent years, there has been a growing debate on this question that has taken place mainly within the philosophy of science. But it is generally acknowledged that a thought experiment has at least three parts: (i) an imaginary scenario; (ii) an interpretation of the scenario; and (iii) a generalization of the interpretation.6 Because fiction films involve narratives that have similarities with the imaginary scenarios of standard philosophical thought experiments, I argue that some film narratives can involve philosophical thought experiments.7 I have already discussed The Matrix. What the film involves, on my account, is an independent thought experiment that updates and


expands upon Descartes’ Evil Demon thought experiment in the first Meditation (Descartes, 1993).8 Another example of this mode of cinematic philosophy is Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (USA, 1989). Its narrative presents a counterexample to the philosophical claim – dating all the way to Plato (1992) – that one should be moral because not doing so will make one unhappy. The film’s main character is Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau), a very successful ophthalmologist, who is regarded as a pillar of the Jewish community. When his mistress threatens to reveal their affair to his wife and the community in general, he takes out a contract on her life. But rather than suffer for this crime, he benefits from it, for his life and reputation remain intact. In effect, committing this immoral act brings him happiness, allows him to thrive. The film thus presents Judah’s story as a counterexample to the Socratic thesis that evildoers cannot attain happiness. We can represent this more formally by means of the following syllogism, in which P1 is the Socratic thesis and P2 and P3 are shown to be true by the film’s thought experiment: P1: ‘If one acts immorally, one will be unhappy.’ (The Socratic Thesis) P2: Judah acted immorally P3: Judah is not unhappy P1, P2, and P3 form an inconsistent triad. The only way to resolve this inconsistency, given the cinematic thought experiment, is to deny that P1 is true, thereby rejecting the Socratic thesis. The benefit of the account I have just given of this second way in which films ‘do’ philosophy is that it helps explain why a narrative film can count as doing philosophy despite its presenting a specific case. The tension between the specific narrative presented by a film and philosophy’s claim to universality is resolved by the film functioning as a thought experiment that either supports or undermines a general claim. A number of people have objected to drawing an analogy between philosophical fiction films and thought experiments. Murray Smith (2006), for example, argues that, even when there are similar thought experiments in a film and a philosophical article, the two are used for very different purposes. And Deborah Knight (forthcoming) has recently argued that there are so many disanalogies between fiction films and philosophical thought experiments that there is no justification for using the idea of a thought experiment as a way of explaining

20


the possibility of cinematic philosophy. The disanalogies that Knight cites are: philosophical thought experiments are short, do not depend on their method of presentation, focus on concepts not characters, do not involve their audience’s engagement in how they turn out, and are not produced in the context of the institution of literature. Although Smith and Knight raise some genuine issues about the validity of treating fiction films as thought experiments, I think that the real proof will have to be in the pudding, so to speak.9 In addition to the examples I just gave, in Thinking on Screen (2007) I offer interpretations of a number of films that show them to be or to include philosophical thought experiments. I don’t think that a priori arguments about the possibility of film’s ability to present philosophical thought experiments will settle the issue. What’s needed is a critical assessment of the interpretations of specific films that I and others have offered in support of the idea that certain films actually present philosophical thought experiments. Unless these assessments actually undermine the validity of such interpretations, I don’t see that the claim that films cannot present philosophical thought experiments can be established. Richard Eldridge (2009) has recently taken a different tack in criticizing my attempt to use the category of thought experiments as a way to capture one of the fundamental ways in which films can do philosophy. His reluctance to accept my claim stems, I believe, from a feeling that thought experiments are too anemic to properly register the power films have as an artistic medium. After all, a thought experiment is just a real experiment minus the equipment, that is, something that one ‘runs’ in one’s own imagination. But film, like all art, is a highly public medium, presenting sounds and images in an intersubjective setting. His concern is that we lose too much of what’s compelling about this art form if we categorize its philosophical power as lying in its ability to present us with the very brief, sketchy scenarios typical of philosophical thought experiments. Like Knight, Eldridge is concerned that treating certain films as thought experiments reduces lively and engaging works of art to dull, verbal narratives. But why not invert this worry? Rather than hedge on film’s ability to present philosophical thought experiments, I would argue that the thought experiments that abound in the history of philosophy are vivid and exciting, some of the most important and memorable features of a philosophical text even though they need to be run in our own imaginations. Don’t most of us remember, in addition to its claim that justice consists in each part doings its own task, the vivid images from Plato’s Republic of the Cave, the Ring of Gyges, and the Divided Line (Plato 1992)? Or, in addition to Descartes’ initial rejection of all his received beliefs as lacking


sufficient justification, the arresting notion that, in place of God, there is an Evil Demon who spends his time ensuring that nothing that I believe is really true (Descartes [1993])? What we need to do is to emphasize the importance and vivacity of such thought experiments in philosophy proper in order to give the thesis that films contain philosophical thought experiments more punch and greater plausibility (see Wartenberg [2010]). I present a third mode of cinematic philosophy in Thinking On Screen (2008) by means of an examination of avant-garde, experimental films. My view is that films in what is known as the structural tradition of avant-garde filmmaking are doing philosophy by performing real cinematic experiments. These experiments are designed to confirm a thesis about the nature of film, normally what the minimum characteristics a work must have in order to qualify as a film. By creating works that lack many or even most of the features that traditional films have, these experimental films – a word that we can now see as applying to them in more than one sense – seek to establish the minimum criteria that a work has to have in order to be a film. One example of an experimental film that I discuss is Andy Warhol’s Empire (USA, 1965). The film, which lasts over seven hours, consists of a single, static shot of the Empire State Building taken from a neighboring building on the night of 25 June 25 1964. What I take the film to establish is that films, which are often called moving pictures, do not have to picture movement at all. Although they can do this, they do not have to. Indeed, because of their ability to depict motion, they also have the possibility of depicting stasis, something that surprisingly is not possible in a static medium such as painting.10 The distinctive feature of such films, from a philosophical point of view, is that they are real experiments. And because they are real experiments, they can fail. So a filmmaker working in this tradition might attempt to make something that is a film but not succeed in so doing because the work she produced lacks those minimum features actually necessary for something to be a film. Although this is not the case with Empire, Trevor Ponech (2006) claims that Hollis Frampton tried but failed to make a film when he experimented by holding a colored gel in front of the lens of a projector that was beaming light onto a screen. According to Ponech, this cinematic experiment failed to actually make a film because there was nothing in the projector that was projected onto the screen. Although one might dispute Ponech’s claim that, for a work to be a film, it must include a projectable object run through a projector, I cite it to explain why works in this avant-garde tradition qualify as experiments. They are experiments because they are attempts to construct films that lack many of the features

22


of traditional films and, as such, they can fail by simply subtracting too much and therefore not counting as films. Of course, our determination of whether they succeed or fail depends on our own theoretical commitments, but that does not affect their status as genuine experiments. Although there is a rich literature about such experimental films, they have not attracted as much attention from philosophers of film as have narrative films. I hope, in part, to correct this by drawing philosophers’ attention to this rich and interesting tradition of filmmaking. Paying attention to this tradition of experimental filmmaking is important for philosophers interested in assessing the possibilities for cinematic philosophy, for the films demonstrate a distinctive avenue that films have explored philosophically. Let me be clear about one thing: At the time that I wrote Thinking on Screen, I did not take my presentation of these three modes of cinematic philosophy to constitute a complete or even a systematic presentation of the ways in which films could achieve something of philosophical significance. I acknowledged that I was proceeding in what I characterized as a ‘local – that is, particular and empirical’ (Wartenberg, 2007, p. 28) – manner, simply in order to stake a claim for the existence of cinematic philosophy. The metaphor of staking a claim is, I think, an apt one, for I saw myself then as one of the first explorers of a nearly virgin territory whose outlines were vague at best. By staking out these initial claims, my hope was to secure that land as territory that future explorers would be able to map out more precisely and systematically. But I recognize – and did at the time that I wrote the book – that philosophy consists of more than the very specific techniques I discussed in the book. But the reason that I dwelt upon these specific ones was that I wanted to avoid adopting a contested view of philosophy from which to argue that, according to that very specific understanding of what philosophy is, a film could be philosophy. So, for example, I would not have wanted to adopt a highly controversial understanding of philosophy such as that proposed by Michelle LeDouf (1989), according to which philosophy itself is inherently imagistic, even though it would make it easier to argue that an image-based artistic medium like film should count as doing philosophy. To sum up, then, Philosophy On Screen is an attempt to demonstrate the validity of MPCP, the view that films not only can, but also actually have made contributions to the discipline of philosophy. It presents three ways in which films have philosophized – by illustrating philosophical theories, presenting philosophical thought experiments, and conducting actual experiments – but does not take these three modes to be a complete


catalogue of the ways in which cinematic philosophy can be done. Rather, I see it as opening up some fertile territory for future development by others in the attempt to map out the reality of cinematic philosophy.

Notes 1. I should acknowledge Herbert Granger’s discussion of a film that he takes to involve the actual doing of philosophy (Granger, 2004). But Granger’s contention that the film is actually depicting a character doing philosophy is one I do not agree with. 2. The one film theorist whom Livingston identifies as a proponent of the bold thesis is Jean Epstein. See Livingston, p. 18, fn 3. The claims of Gilles Deleuze (1986 and 1989) also seem to clearly satisfy Livingston’s characterization of it. 3. See Cavell (2004, 119–44) for an illuminating discussion of the problematic nature of attempts to establish a philosophical boundary. 4. Future developments in film are relevant because new genres, such as that of the epistemic twist film, can be used to address philosophical issues. See Wilson (2006). 5. Steve Shaviro (2007) supports this view, although he also emphasizes features of the film’s use of digital technology that certainly need to be reflected upon more fully than they have been. 6. I adapt Tamar Szabo Gendler’s characterization of thought experiments (Gendler, 2000, p. 21). 7. This is a recent point of contention between myself (2009) and Bruce Russell (2009). 8. This interpretation of The Matrix has been contested by, among others, David Chalmers (2005). 9. The issues I have in mind involve questioning whether fiction films themselves have the tripartite structure of philosophical thought experiments. 10. Greg Tuck pointed out that there is a parallel auditory potential that films have because of their use of synchronous sound: They are able to present silence to their audiences.

References Cavell, S., 2004. Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chalmers, D., 2005. ‘The Matrix as Metaphysics’. In C. Grau, ed., Philosophers Explore ‘The Matrix’. New York: Oxford, pp. 132–76. Deleuze, G.. 1986 and 1989. Cinema, Volume 1 and 2. Translated by H. Tomlinson and B. Hasberjam. Descartes, R., 1993. Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Translated by D. A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishers. Eldridge, R., 2009. ‘Philosophy In/Of/As/And Film’. Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 3.1, pp. 109–16. Frampton, D., 2006. Filmosophy. London: Wallflower Books. Gendler, T. S., 2000. Thought Experiment: On the Powers and Limits of Imaginary Cases. New York: Garland.

24


Granger, H., 2004. ‘Cinematic Philosophy in Le Feu follet: The Search for a Meaningful Life’. Film and Philosophy 8, pp. 74–90. Kant, I., 1933. The Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by N. K. Smith. London: Macmillan. Knight, D., forthcoming. ‘The Third Man: Ethics, Aesthetics, Irony’. In W. Jones and S. Vice, eds. Ethics in Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Le Doeuff, Mi., 1989. The Philosophical Imaginary. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Livingston, P., 2006. ‘Theses on Cinema as Philosophy’. In M. Smith and T. Wartenberg, pp. 1–18. Mulhall, S., 2008. On Film, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Nietzsche, F., 1978. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by W. Kaufmann. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Plato, 1992. The Republic. Translated by G.M.A Grube and C.D.C Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishers. Ponech, T., ‘The Substance of Cinema’. In M. Smith and T. Wartenberg, 2006, pp. 187–98. Russell, B., 2000. ‘The Philosophical Limits of Film’. Film and Philosophy (Special Edition on Woody Allen), pp. 163–7. ——, 2008. ‘Film’s Limits: The Sequel’. Film and Philosophy 12, pp. 1–16. ——, 2009. ‘Film’s Limits Again’, Film and Philosophy 13. Shaviro, S., 2007. ‘Emotion Capture: Affect in Digital Film’. Projections: The Journal of Movies and Mind 1.2, pp. 37–56. Smith, M., 2006. ’Film Art, Argument, and Ambiguity’, in Smith and Wartenberg, pp. 33–42. Smith, M. and Wartenberg, T.E., 2006. Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Wartenberg, T., 2007. Thinking On Screen: Film as Philosophy. London: Routledge. ——, 2010. ‘Response to My Critics’. Film and Philosophy 14, pp. 123–34. Wilson, G. M. 2006. ‘Transparency and Twist in Narrative Fiction Film’ in M. Smith and T. Wartenberg, eds (2006), pp. 81–96.

Filmography Alien (Ridley Scott, USA 1979). Aliens (James Cameron, USA, 1986). Alien3 (David Fincher, USA 1992). Alien: Resurrection (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, USA, 1997). All of Me (Carl Reiner, USA, 1984). The Conformist (Il Conformista, Bernardo Bertolucci, Italy,1970). Crimes and Misdemeanors (Woody Allen, USA, 1989). Empire (Andy Warhol, USA, 1965). Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, USA, 2004). The Fire Within (Le Feu follet, Louis Malle, France, 1963). The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, USA, 1999). Waking Life (Richard Linklatter, USA, 2001).

2 Re-enfranchising Film: Towards a Romantic Film-Philosophy Robert Sinnerbrink

One of two things is usually missing in the so-called Philosophy of Art: either philosophy or art. Friedrich Schlegel, Critical Fragments #12 The relationship between philosophy and film has attracted intensive speculation in recent years. Indeed we can now speak of the ‘philosophy of film’ as an independent area of inquiry with its own journals, monographs, and conferences (see Wartenberg, 2008). Despite this welcome flourishing of approaches, I shall ask whether Arthur Danto’s thesis concerning the ‘philosophical disenfranchisement of art’ (1986) might apply to (some) contemporary theoretical approaches to film. Philosophers of film repeat the gesture of philosophical disenfranchisement, for example, when they argue that philosophy’s primary task in relation to cinema is, say, to clarify theoretically problems of perception, representation, or understanding; or to show the underlying conceptual or moral significance of various kinds of film narrative; or to translate cinematic presentation into recognizable forms of philosophical argumentation; or to analyse conceptually the aesthetic ‘source material’ provided by various films or film genres, and so on. In such approaches, film is taken to be an inferior form of knowing, and is subsumed within a theoretical framework that typically reduces its aesthetic complexity. Doing philosophy of film from this point of view is a respectable but risky undertaking, particularly if we assume film is an aesthetic object requiring translation into a conceptual metalanguage. For then we risk philosophically disenfranchising film by ignoring what is aesthetically specific to it in favour of conceptual comprehension, thereby reducing the specificity of film to familiar philosophical tropes, or else 25

26


treating it as a pretext for theoretical analysis. To disenfranchise film in this way, however, is to do justice neither to film nor philosophy. As Simon Critchley remarks, referring to philosophers’ inveterate tendency to reduce the aesthetic complexity of film: ‘To read from cinematic language to some philosophical metalanguage is both to miss what is specific to the medium of film and usually to engage in some sort of cod-philosophy deliberately designed to intimidate the uninitiated’ (2005, p.139). In a similar vein, Daniel Frampton complains that much writing within the area of philosophy and film ‘simply ignores cinematics and concentrates on stories and character motivations’ (2006, p.9). In the enthusiastic rush to find philosophical meaning in film, Frampton quips, ‘[i]t only takes one character to say “man is not an island” for somebody to jump up and declare the film philosophical’ (2006, p.9). In this respect, Critchley and Frampton echo Stephen Mulhall’s oft-quoted recommendation, in his book on the Aliens quartet, to acknowledge film’s capacity for (philosophical) self-reflection, in a manner comparable to, though distinct from, philosophy: ‘Such films are not philosophy’s raw material, nor a source for its ornamentation; they are philosophical exercises, philosophy in action – film as philosophizing’ (2002, p.2). All three philosophers I have just cited are united in their criticisms of philosophically reductionistic approaches to film; all three also champion pluralistic, non-reductionistic ways of thinking through the film-philosophy relationship. Nonetheless, the temptation to disenfranchise film – reducing it to an inferior way of knowing or subsuming it within a received conceptual framework – continues to haunt many philosophical approaches. Fortunately, however, there are also various styles of philosophising on and with film that attempt to overcome this disenfranchisement.1 This alternative approach, which I call ‘romantic film-philosophy’, is distinguished by its questioning of the assumption that conceptual theorisation should be privileged over cinematic aesthetics. Romantic film-philosophy responds to film as a way of thinking, one that might even be understood as distinctively cinematic. In what follows, I argue that this romantic approach to film-philosophy – which takes film to be capable of the aesthetic disclosure of novel aspects of our experience – provides a salutary way of overcoming the philosophical disenfranchisement of film. It attempts to do justice to the complexity of the film-philosophy relationship, allowing film to be philosophically self-reflective, while opening up the possibility that philosophy might be transformed through its encounter with film.

Re-enfranchising Film: Romantic Film-Philosophy

27

Nana and the philosopher In a famous scene from Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie (France, 1962), the central character Nana (Anna Karina) enters a café and asks an older man to buy her a drink. She suddenly finds she has nothing to say to him. This prompts ‘the philosopher’ (played by French philosopher Brice Parain) to tell her a story from Dumas’s The Three Musketeers about how excessive thought paralyses action. Why tell her this strange tale? ‘No reason,’ he replies, ‘just to talk.’ Nana thinks the story both beautiful and frightening. The philosopher replies that it is frightening but gives us a clue: ‘We are only able to speak well after we renounce living for a while. It’s the price we pay.’ Why must we always talk, she asks, why can’t we just live in silence? A nice idea, the philosopher admits, but not something we can live. There is no thought without language; yet we often struggle to find the right words for what we think. During his philosophical soliloquy, Nana turns briefly to face the camera, her extraordinary face holding our gaze in an ambiguous gesture of acknowledgment and provocation. Nana turns away and objects that one can’t live in everyday life that way – with the sort of detachment required by philosophical speech. The philosopher agrees, but suggests that this is why we swing between speech and silence, the life we live and the life we think. The philosopher ‘kills’ mundane life in order to speak, whereas Nana (‘the unwitting philosopher’) silences reflection in order to live – vivre sa vie.2 This wonderfully rich and enigmatic scene readily comes to mind in thinking about the relationship between film and philosophy. The charm of the scene, for me, lies in its ‘screening’ of the film-philosophy encounter in one of those nostalgically atmospheric Parisian cafes that populate Godard’s films of the early 1960s. It manages to artfully combine the contingencies of time and place, the singularities of performance, and the resonances of reflection. It lingers on the fascinating and enigmatic visage of Anna Karina, whose character’s story it is but whose screen presence is also a mesmerising personification of the power of cinema; its seductive visual fascination and its tendency towards spectacle, absorption, and distraction. It depicts a ‘real’ philosopher (Brice Parain), playing himself, playing at philosophy, engaging in a subtly unsettling discussion – on the relationship between thought and action, philosophy and life, no less – with us, with Godard’s film, as much as with the film’s heroine, Nana. She plays the ‘unwitting philosopher’ (as the intertitle to this sequence states), caught between life and reflection, a character whose own life – one of economically motivated prostitution – ends in a

28


typically Godardian gangster-film denouement: a life and death at once existential and economic, poetic and political. The significance of this scene is amplified if we take the encounter between Nana and The Philosopher to capture something of the ambiguity of the strange encounter between film and philosophy. Nana and the cinema (the ‘unwitting philosopher’) have to suspend life – action and movement – in order to think and articulate it; but cinema’s own life – conventional Hollywood narrative, if you will – has to be interrupted, suspended, if cinema is to become philosophical, even political, which is what Godard’s cinematic Brechtianism presumably intends. Philosophy, for its part, in the figure of Brice Parain (incidentally, Godard’s teacher, whom philosopher Gilles Deleuze also admired), has to engage cinema on its own terms, commencing a conversation that interweaves philosophical reflection, sensuous expression, and cinematic spectacle. To engage film on its own terms, however, also means to ‘kill’ philosophy; to leave the academy, to forego conceptual mastery, to sit in a café – or a movie theatre – and engage a stranger, this enigmatic other, in cryptic, allusive, even seductive conversation. Is philosophy up to this task? Can it watch, listen, converse, even seduce? Or will it revert to its old ways and attempt to master the life of film that now enlivens it? Will Nana end up prostituting herself only to be killed for (no apparent) reason? Will philosophy dominate the life and beauty of the film that it so desires, or does it desire to be seduced by film and transformed into something other than ‘philosophy’? These are the sorts of questions that I think animate, behind the scenes, the otherwise rather staid discussions of the relationship between film and philosophy within contemporary academic debates.

Film and/as philosophy or philosophy and/as film? The questions raised by the film-philosophy relationship are far from simple. How should we speak, that is to say write, philosophically about film? Can we speak of film doing philosophy? Conversely, is there any way that philosophy might be transformed by its encounter with film? It is striking that amidst the enormous surge of interest in the filmphilosophy relationship most debate has focused on whether film can be understood philosophically or even as a kind of philosophising in its own right.3 Little attention, however, has been given to the question whether philosophy itself is transformed through its encounter with film. Does philosophy remain ‘philosophy’ once it begins to engage seriously with film? Does the cinema provide its own forms of experience, of


29

thinking, which might transform philosophy in distinctive ways? If we can speak of the becoming-philosophical of film, then perhaps we can we also speak about the ‘becoming-cinematic’ of philosophy. This is the thesis I wish to explore. What I am calling romantic film-philosophy takes this question seriously, and thereby attempts to undo the traditional privileging of philosophy over art, of conceptual knowledge over perceptual experience. It thus reverses, so I shall argue, the disenfranchisement of cinema that still dominates much contemporary philosophy of film. There are clearly some philosophers who do think that film can profoundly transform philosophy. Stanley Cavell remarks that his concern with the question of philosophy and its future was set in motion not only through his encounter with Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations but also through his experience of certain films: Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of A Summer Night (Sommarnattens leende) (Sweden, 1955), Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (Italy/France, 1960), Alain Resnais’ and Marguerite Duras’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (France/Japan, 1959) (Cavell, 2007, p.29). For Cavell (as for Gilles Deleuze), there is strong affinity or kinship between works of art, literature, film, and philosophy. Emerson and Antonioni, Wittgenstein and Bergman, the problem of scepticism and the comedy of remarriage; all can be said to engage in thinking, albeit in different ways. In Cavell’s eyes, Wittgensteinian investigation and Emersonian perfectionism join hands with European art cinema and Hollywood romantic comedy. All are engaged in the search for adequate philosophical and cinematic responses to the question of the future, that is, the possibility of both inheriting and transforming tradition – the possibility of creating the new. On the so-called ‘Continental’ side of the divide, Gilles Deleuze also talks of the necessity of an encounter that provokes a ‘shock to thought’ (1985, 1989). Whether through the novels of Marcel Proust, Sacher-Masoch, or Franz Kakfa; the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Roberto Rossellini, or Jean Rouch; the thought of Henri Bergson, C.S. Peirce, or Friedrich Nietzsche; it is in the strange and novel encounters between these artistic and philosophical forms that new thought – creative philosophical thought – can emerge. Both thinkers argue for a view of philosophy as a practice capable of both inheriting the past and disclosing future possibilities of thought; both are committed to philosophy’s task of thinking, or even creating, the New. Indeed, both thinkers, as I shall discuss, can be described as continuing the tradition of what Nikolas Kompridis has called ‘philosophical romanticism’ (2006b). And as far as this task is concerned, both are clearly convinced that film can

30


be regarded as an equal, a fellow collaborator with philosophy, rather than merely an interesting object, theoretical exemplar, or intellectual subordinate.

A User’s guide to film and philosophy Given the early interest in the film-philosophy relationship (one need only think of Hugo Münsterberg’s 1916 work, The Photoplay), and the subsequent work of Arnheim, Bazin, Kracauer, Mitry, and many others, it is striking that Anglophone philosophers otherwise neglected film for most of the twentieth century. So why has philosophy suddenly become so interested in film? It is significant that philosophy rediscovered film at the very time when film studies began its retreat from (French) ‘Theory’. As David Bordwell and Noël Carroll tell us, we have now entered the era of ‘post-Theory’ (1996), a code word for the analytic-cognitivist turn in film studies. As D. N. Rodowick confirms, during the 1980s film studies was challenged on three fronts, suffering a ‘triple displacement’ by historical studies, cognitivist psychology, and analytic philosophy (2007, pp.94–5). Much of what is now dismissed as outmoded Film Theory – psychoanalytical, semiotic, and ‘Continental’inspired approaches – is better regarded, Rodowick claims, as ‘aesthetics’ or ‘film philosophy’ (2007, p.100). Indeed, the philosophical approach to film practised by Cavell and Deleuze – what I am calling romantic film-philosophy – can make an important contribution, Rodowick argues, to a ‘vigorous debate on what should constitute a philosophy of the humanities critically and reflexively attentive in equal measure to its epistemological and ethical commitments’ (2007, p.92). The combined analytic-cognitivist attack on ‘Theory’ for its lack of scientific credibility and philosophical cogency, moreover, has had the unfortunate effect of disenfranchising the humanities’ approach to art and culture more generally: ‘the contestation of [film] theory’, as Rodowick observes, ‘becomes a de facto epistemological dismissal of the humanities’ (2007, p.98). Psychoanalysis, for example, which once ruled the film theory scene, is now treated – unfairly, in my view – as a superseded or even perverse doctrine. Like Gnosticism, Voodoo, or Marxism, it still survives in isolated underground sects, and might still have some vague historical or sociological value for the academic connoisseur, but little else to offer the contemporary theorist or film practitioner. In the meantime, a new paradigm has arrived and normal science has resumed. Cognitive theory, analytic philosophy, neuroscience, even evolutionary biology


31

have joined forces to lay down an ambitious ‘naturalistic’ research programme that includes film – and the philosophy of film – in its purview, frequently coupled with an implicit (and sometimes stridently explicit) critique of psychoanalytical and ‘Continental’ approaches to film (see Carroll, 1996; Allen and Smith 1997; Grodal 2009).4 Though tempting, I think it would be a mistake to classify this tension as a version of the much debated, and rather dubious, analytic/‘Continental’ divide in philosophy.5 Instead, it is better understood as a conflict between scientistic and humanistic approaches to film, or more precisely between rationalist and romanticist approaches to cinema and the question of what the relationship between philosophy and film could become. To risk a general schema, contemporary philosophical work on film can be defined by the following competing currents. (1) While psychoanalytical and semiotic orthodoxies have entered a decline, other theoretical perspectives remain important (cultural studies, media theory, post-colonialism, gender studies, reception studies, production histories, and so on). On the other hand, (2), ‘post-Theory’, cognitivism, analytic philosophy, and more recently neuroscience and evolutionary biology have begun to coalesce into a formidable research paradigm, which argues that film studies needs to be based on the best available science, preferably grounded in a philosophical naturalism, and capable of demonstrating cumulative results. We might define these, respectively, as the culturalist–historicist versus the cognitivist–naturalist approaches to film. Against these two approaches we can also point to 3) the recent emergence of what I call ‘film-philosophy’, the founding figures of which I take to be Cavell and Deleuze. Their path-breaking works treated film as an artform capable of engaging in a distinctly cinematic exploration of philosophical themes, and one that could provoke philosophy to respond in its own way to what film enables us to experience (see Cavell, 1979, 1981, 1996; Deleuze, 1985, 1989). Such a perspective is distinct from the more conventional ‘philosophy of film’, which increasingly is affiliated with 2) the cognitivist-naturalist approach.6 To anticipate my thesis, what distinguishes Cavell and Deleuze from prevailing currents of Anglo-American philosophy of film is a rejection of what we might call the ‘Platonic prejudice’: the epistemological privileging of philosophy over art (including film), which rests on the valorisation of conceptual reflection over perceptual experience. Along with Cavell and Deleuze, other film philosophers (such as Jacques Rancière) have engaged in similar critiques of this Platonic prejudice concerning film (see also Wartenberg, 2007, pp.15–31). What unites many of these

32


thinkers is another anti-Platonic gesture: an ethico-political commitment to the inherent egalitarianism of the cinema as a genuinely popular technological artform that has implicitly democratic potentials. By virtue of its technological capabilities of recording, cinema is uniquely able to make any subject or event worthy of audiovisual temporal presentation. It belongs to what Rancière calls the aesthetic regime of art, which undoes the hierarchical orders of representation structuring more traditional regimes of art, opens up experience to a plurality of forms of presentation, and thus anticipates the possibility of an aesthetic critique or even transformation of modern experience (2004). It is this third philosophical approach to film – the emergence of film-philosophy in the last few decades – that I wish to explore in the remainder of this chapter. Before doing so, however, I should also mention another recent trend, namely the pedagogical use of film to analyse, illustrate, or explore traditional philosophical problems (see Falzon, 2002; Litch, 2002). This approach reads films philosophically as a way of introducing, via the devices of film narrative, well-known philosophical arguments, problems, or concepts (the problem of knowledge, of appearance versus reality, the problems of free will and determinism, of moral autonomy, justice, and so on). This approach is certainly pedagogically fruitful and provides a popular platform for disseminating philosophy; but it also tends to instrumentalise film as providing readymade examples of predetermined philosophical issues. On this view, films such as The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, USA/ Australia, 1999) vividly present philosophical thought-experiments (concerning, for example, the problem of scepticism) that invite further reflection in order to explicate their philosophical or intellectual import (see Wartenberg, 2007, pp.67–75). Sceptics who criticise the idea that films philosophise, however, argue that films like The Matrix or Alien (Ridley Scott, USA, 1979) do not really advance philosophical debate, whether on Descartes, scepticism, or anything else, since they merely dramatize or ‘toy’ with ideas, and hence cannot be regarded as philosophically significant (see Baggini, 2003). Or they maintain that film’s inherent ambiguity as a form of sensuous representation – as with all artforms – disqualifies it from competing with the logical rigour, argumentative clarity, or epistemological assertiveness of philosophy proper (Smith, 2006). But these criticisms overlook the rather obvious point that we are talking about a complex translation or even transformation between different media of thought; one that raises many difficulties concerning the idea of translating between visual and verbal media, between conceptual and


33

non-conceptual forms of presentation, standard versus non-standard forms of argumentation, how philosophy and art should be related, and much else besides. Does it make sense to hold The Matrix – or for that matter, Terrence Malick’s, or Lars von Trier’s, or David Lynch’s films – to the protocols of philosophical argumentation? That would be like criticising Proust’s In Search of Lost Time because it has a scientifically uninformed theory of memory; or like dismissing Beckett’s Film (Alan Schneider/Samuel Beckett, USA 1965) for having a questionable interpretation of Berkeley’s dictum, esse est percipi.7 Surely it is a question, rather, of how film uses its own medium to explore philosophical questions, with all the ambiguity, plurality, and open-endedness that remain the prerogative of works of art, whether they be literary, visual, or cinematic. We might ask, for example, on what grounds we assume that films cannot be ‘philosophical’ unless they conform to the rather narrow criteria we take to be pertinent to philosophical discourse. Is the meaning of philosophy so obvious? As Danto observes, philosophy comprises various genres of writing that include the most multifarious styles: these include myths, anecdotes, dialogues, lectures, allegories, summae, consolatios, essays, meditations, treatises, prolegomena, critiques, dialectics, encyclopaedias, systems, analyses, arguments, demonstrations, phenomenologies, aphorisms, fragments, poems, unscientific postscripts, refutations, tractatuses, investigations, manifestos, polemics, parodies – and, of course, the academic research paper. At any rate, such a claim – film is philosophical only if it conforms to certain fixed criteria defining ‘philosophy’ as it is currently practised – assumes that the aim of any conjunction between philosophy and film is to see whether film can be readily translated into a philosophically acceptable metalanguage: in a word, whether film (the Other) can be reduced to philosophy (the Same). Such an assumption ignores that possibility that we might have our thinking transformed by how films ‘think’ in their own specific media; or that there might be ways in which films prompt us to question what we take philosophy to be or how thinking can occur; or that we might be forced to think something anew because of the kind of experience – or ‘shock to thought’ – that certain films can elicit or evoke. Many philosophers persist, however, in complacently reiterating what they regard philosophy to be (and what is to count as ‘proper’ philosophical discourse), and hence miss the opportunity to be challenged by what film can do (that perhaps philosophy cannot). To refuse the possibility that film can transform what doing philosophy means, however, is to philosophically disenfranchise film.

34


The philosophical disenfranchisement of cinema? Given the strength of the traditional antagonism between philosophy and poetry, what are we to make of the recent happy nuptials between film and philosophy? Such a question assumes, of course, that we already know what philosophy is, that we can readily distinguish it from non-philosophy, from that which pretends to be philosophy but is merely sophistry, rhetoric, or poetry. This is, of course, the founding gesture of philosophy with the Greeks; the distinguishing of philosophy from its rival claimants to knowledge and truth (sophistry, rhetoric, and poetry). And it continues to be a defining gesture of much philosophical discourse, whether in the analytic versus Continental debate (with the latter playing the role of sophistry, rhetoric, or poetry), or in the way philosophy often maintains a distance from other humanities disciplines (like literary and film theory), while defending its privileged relationship with the sciences (most recently, cognitive science). To elucidate what I mean let me recite a familiar philosophical fable. Plato (or rather Socrates) tells us in The Republic that there is ‘an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry’.8 In Book X, Plato famously criticises art (techne) and in particular poetry for its epistemic deceptiveness, irrational appeal to the senses and emotions, hence pedagogical and moral dubiousness. Indeed, as many theorists have observed, the famous image of Plato’s cave – a metaphor for our human bondage within the sensuous world of appearances and ignorance of the true intelligible world of Ideas – bears an uncanny resemblance to the cinema. The point of the repeated recitation of this observation concerning Plato’s cave, however, is less to show the inherent affinity of philosophy and film than their inherent antagonism. After all, according to Plato it is the fascinating appearances of the image-world that we must forgo if we are to acquire genuine knowledge and attain intellectual and moral virtue. Plato’s founding gesture concerning philosophy’s relationship with the justly governed city was based upon a series of defining exclusions: against sensuous perception and the emotions, and against rhetoric, art, and poetry.9 The Platonic attack on art neutralizes it by stressing art’s epistemic inferiority and moral perniciousness, thereby setting the scene for the subsequent philosophical subsumption of art as an inferior way of knowing the world. How has this disenfranchisement proceeded? Arthur Danto distinguishes two distinct but related strategies: (1) the ephemeralisation of art (the Kantian-aestheticist view of art as the object of a disinterested pleasure); and (2) the philosophical takeover


35

of art (the Hegelian view that modern art becomes self-reflexive and is eventually superseded by the philosophy of art, which comprehends what art is) (Danto, 1986). On the one hand, we have an aesthetic formalism that neutralises art’s moral-political power; on the other, we have the integration or subsuming of art within the edifice of reason, relegating art to an inadequate form of knowledge destined to be completed by philosophical theory. My contention here is that much of what Danto describes as the ‘philosophical disenfranchisement of art’ also applies to many contemporary philosophies of film. Philosophy repeats this disenfranchisement when it reduces the polyvalent medium of film to a univocal conceptual discourse; this gesture maintains the hierarchy of philosophy over art, curtailing the possibility of film being capable of independent reflection, or even of questioning philosophy as such. More generally, this philosophical disenfranchisement can be seen as a response to what philosophy perceives as the ‘metaphysical danger’ posed by film. Here we could list, for example, its non-conceptual forms of presentation, or its rhetorical form of ‘argumentation’ through re-description: the revealing and thematising of alternative descriptions or points of view upon a recognizable yet ambiguous world. Indeed, the singular power of film as a visual, aural, and temporal artform lies, I suggest, in its creation of unique virtual film-worlds that we temporarily inhabit during the immersive experience of film viewing (not to mention its powerful imprinting of individual and collective memory). It is this immersive experience of the cinema – the relinquishing of one’s engaged perception, thought, and action in favour of a sensuous receptivity, affective engagement, and reflective openness towards virtual cinematic worlds – that philosophy finds so uncanny, even anxiety-inducing, about film. It’s Plato’s cave all over again. Underlying this philosophical anxiety is the Platonic schema that privileges conception over perception, and that suspects (cinematic) art because of its aesthetico-political power; its inherently democratic potential as the egalitarian, technological art of modernity. Given the overtly political context of the early days of film or screen studies – the conjunction of semiotic analysis, Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalytical theory, feminist analysis, Althusserian–Marxist theories of ideology – the philosophical disenfranchisement of film can also be regarded an attempt to quarantine film’s ethico-political dimensions. Whereas film theory was once at the centre of debates on desire, gender, sexuality, and subjectivity, not to mention ideology, today one can safely venture through many contemporary philosophical analyses of film without

36


ever encountering such overtly ‘political’ concerns, let alone reflection on the role of cinema within the cultural context of global capitalism.10 Surely philosophical reflection on film does not mean suspending its relation to politics, history, culture, or technics, especially given the cinema’s central role in revealing and perhaps even transforming modern experience. To do so, however, would once again be to participate in film’s philosophical disenfranchisement. Surely, the reader might be thinking, these rather grandiose claims are not true of all philosophical approaches to film. To be sure, there are many contemporary approaches that successfully avoid the excesses of philosophical disenfranchisement that I have discussed thus far. Yet even in these more felicitous cases there is nonetheless a tendency to reduce the complexity of film to a received philosophical discourse or assumed set of philosophical problems.11 Fortunately, however, there is another way of thinking the film-philosophy relationship that explicitly seeks to reverse this disenfranchisement.

Towards a romantic film-philosophy What I am calling romantic film-philosophy points the way out of the labyrinth that philosophy has constructed to keep film in its place. It does not presuppose the conceptual superiority of philosophy over cinema, avoids the temptation to translate film into a philosophical metalanguage, and thereby opens up the possibility that philosophy might be transformed through its encounter with film. Film and philosophy become partners in a ‘thinking dialogue’; a transformative engagement that helps elaborate the philosophy immanent within particular films, while prompting philosophy to respond creatively to the kind of thinking that cinema allows us to experience. So what might this mutual becoming between film and philosophy look like? To address this question I should first clarify what I mean by the vexed term ‘romanticism’. To this end I draw upon Nikolas Kompridis’s fine collection, Philosophical Romanticism, which includes essays by Cavell, J.M. Bernstein, Robert Pippin, among others (see 2006b). This will allow me to elucidate in what respects I am recommending the genre of romantic film-philosophy as a way of philosophically re-enfranchising film. For Kompridis, philosophical romanticism can be viewed as a response to the problem of modernity, a transformative re-inheritance of the frequently disparaged tradition of romantic thought, art, and culture. Romanticism, on this view, is not only a critique of the enlightenment


37

but also a way of thinking how we might better live ‘the modern ideals of autonomy, reason, critique, and expressive subjectivity’ (2006b, p.3). It is simultaneously a critique of modern philosophy and a cultural critique of modernity. At the same time, it is self-critical about what counts as philosophical discourse, and how such discourse might be transformed and renewed. Philosophical romanticism is thus deeply concerned with the question of philosophical expression, with the question of style, of how philosophical thinking, which is to say writing, often requires something more supple or experimental than conventional argumentation. Philosophical romanticism thus retains its proximity to art and literature, taking the humanities, rather than the sciences, as its primary model for knowledge and understanding (Kompridis, 2006b, p.4). It embraces ‘the new’ but also re-inherits and renews tradition, emphasising ‘receptivity’ as a normative ideal. It does not retreat from, but rather re-imagines the everyday in light of the new possibilities that philosophy (but also art, literature, and film) can disclose. For all this emphasis on culture, however, it also reclaims a reenchanted relationship with nature, particularly our embodied nature, our sensuous corporeal being, ‘as a source of meaning and orientation’ (Kompridis, 2006b, p.5). Finally, it is distinguished by its commitment to realising a romantic conception of freedom: the capacity to claim one’s words and actions as one’s own, ‘as spontaneously originating from oneself,’ while also acknowledging the complex forms of social and political dependency that make possible just such a claiming (Kompridis, 2006b, p.6). In sum, philosophical romanticism, for all its diverse variants, is defined by the attempt to inherit and renew tradition in order to think the new; to engage in the (reflective) disclosure of alternative possibilities of thought and action. Art, literature, and film are essential to this task, for they provide alternative forms of aesthetic disclosure that open up new possibilities of thought, meaning, and action. Philosophy, art, and film, for the philosophical romantic, are all forms of worlddisclosure (and indeed of world-making); they are forms of thinking that use different means than philosophy in order to think, create, and communicate experience. What does this mean for rethinking the film-philosophy relationship? Romantic film-philosophy, I want to suggest, provides a way of reversing the philosophical disenfranchisement of cinema. It opens up the possibility of an egalitarian, transformative relationship between philosophy and film, allowing film to be philosophical while transforming philosophy through its encounter with film. To make these

38


claims somewhat more concrete, let me identify three features of romantic film-philosophy that contribute to the philosophical reenfranchisement of film. The first is that it avoids assuming that there is a readymade conceptual framework or theoretical approach that should be applied to a film to reveal its meaning or, alternatively, which the film is supposed to illustrate. The second is a sustained receptiveness to what film aesthetically discloses; an engagement with the aesthetic elements of film, the reflection it inspires, and to the way film resists immediate translation into theoretical argument. This kind of responsiveness to film’s forms of aesthetic disclosure, its distinctive ways of thinking, might involve, for example, consideration not only of its narrative aspects but its audiovisual rhythms, hermeneutic ambiguities, and capacity to both enact and evoke affective forms of thought. Third, and taking the above into account, is an openness to transforming how one can think and write philosophically about film, exploring ways in which we can find words to articulate what film allows us to experience, and elaborating upon what it ‘thinks’ in its own distinctive manner. Romantic film-philosophy is animated by the possibility that, rather than having its truth revealed by it, film might transform philosophy into the possibility of thinking ‘the New’.

How to do things with images Let me take as an example of the kind of approach I am suggesting Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit’s recent book, Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (2004). Bersani and Dutoit offer a fascinating series of reflections on three distinctive and generically disparate films: Godard’s Le Mépris (France/Italy, 1963), Pedro Almódovar’s Todo sobre mi madre (Spain, 2004), and Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (USA, 1998). In doing so they offer an exemplary case of the kind of philosophical reflection that thinks along with or even accompanies film (in the sense of musical accompaniment). The temptation for most philosophical interpreters of film, by contrast, might be to begin a discussion of Godard’s Le Mépris, for example, with a summary of recent work on theories of cinematic reflexivity or an account of metafilmic narrative; or an interpretation of Almódovar’s Todo sobre mi madre with a discussion of various theories of mourning and melancholia; or to commence an interpretation of Malick’s The Thin Red Line with, say, an overview of Heidegger’s existential phenomenology in Being and Time. As the reader might be thinking, this is not unwarranted. Le Mépris is a dazzling and sophisticated cinematic reflection on the making of


39

movies, their power as modern myths, on the vicissitudes of desire, not to mention the complex dialectic between Hollywood and the European tradition. Todo sobre mi madre is, among other things, a devastating exploration of the traumatic experience of grief inflected via multiple layers of (feminine) performance (medical instruction video, television soap opera, theatrical stage performance, and transfigured Hollywood melodrama). And The Thin Red Line is not only made by a filmmaker who studied with Stanley Cavell and translated Heidegger, but features the kind of poetic imagery, existentially charged limit-experience, and meditative voiceovers that would satisfy the most demanding phenomenologist or romantic existentialist. One can readily understand, therefore, why philosophically-inclined viewers might want to set up their discussion of these films from within a particular theoretical or philosophical framework before attending to the aesthetic particularities and cinematic complexities of the films themselves. And there are many fine works of philosophical film criticism that take precisely this approach.12 Bersani and Dutoit, however, avoid presupposing any readymade philosophical theory that would serve as a prism for analysing and unlocking the hermeneutic dimensions or theoretical import of the films they consider. They eschew the well-trodden ‘philosophy of film’ route, which usually begins by outlining an appropriate theory, concept, or debate, and then applies this discourse to a film by way of analysis, interpretation, or critical reflection. Instead they attempt to allow whatever philosophical thinking might prompted by, or enacted within, these films to emerge from careful and detailed critical analyses of each film that combine aesthetic receptivity with thoughtful speculation. Their chapter on Godard’s Le Mépris, for example, a discussion entitled ‘Forming Couples’, meditates on the nature of contempt and the desire for it. Avoiding the psychological commonplace that contempt is what drives a couple apart, they ask instead ‘what is the appeal of contempt, both for Camille and Godard as a film-maker?’ (2004, p.21). Of concern are not so much its psychic origins but its effects in the world. For the filmmaker and for Godard’s film in particular, ‘what does contempt do to cinematic space?’ (2004, p.21). Here the ethical question of contempt is directly related to cinematic practice and our aesthetic experience of film. Indeed the film itself relates this question to that of the couple but also to the question of the history, possibilities, and future of cinema. The couple in question comprises scriptwriter Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli), who has been hired by Hollywood producer Jerry Provosch

40


(Jack Palance) to ‘sex up’ a Hollywood film version of The Odyssey being directed by Fritz Lang (playing himself); and his glamorous, enigmatic, but distant wife, Camilla (Brigitte Bardot), whose contempt for Paul (and sudden death in a car accident with Provosch) provides Le Mépris with its narrative focus, visual fascination, and driving force. The coupling within the film, however, not only involves the characters whose relationship unravels before our eyes but also the various couplings articulating the film’s intersecting strands: between Odysseus and Penelope, and Paul and Camille; between Homer’s Odyssey and the Hollywood film-within-the-film version; between Alberto Moravia’s ‘mediocre novel’ (upon which the film is based) and Godard’s extraordinary metafilmic meditation; between psychological and non-psychological interpretations of myth (and of film as myth); between masculine and feminine desire (and their troubled coupling); between narrative pleasure in film and its audio-visual interruption; between myth and history, film and philosophy. Along the way Bersani and Dutoit digress on Proust and Caravaggio, Homer and Hollywood, Resnais and Lang, Dante and Hölderlin, with further elaborations on the nature of translation, the ethical import of contempt, and human relations between the spaces of nature, myth, and cinema. The film is thus allowed to show rather than tell; to reveal rather than be reduced; to think rather than be analysed. Indeed Le Mépris’ resistance to reductive theorisation is perhaps best captured in its enigmatic final ‘frameless’ image of ocean and horizon coupled with the off-screen director’s Italian/French command, ‘Silenzio!/Silence!’13 Bersani and Dutoit thus offer us an example of philosophising with rather than on or about film; a philosophical accompaniment to, rather than reductive analysis of, the cinematic experience. It elaborates the thought immanent within film, translating it across different ways of thinking, from non-conceptual to conceptual registers. Such an approach thereby avoids the philosophical temptation to impose an external framework that would instrumentalise the film for the purpose of theoretical explanation. Instead, it is a film-philosophy that takes its lead from film, developing its philosophy from close engagement with the aesthetic particularities of films themselves. The by now standard separation and opposition between philosophical film theory and film criticism is thereby suspended and overcome. Philosophical reflection is developed from close critical interpretation, and this critical reflection is also inspired by the conviction that such films have something to teach philosophy; a new way of thinking and feeling, perhaps even a new way of writing philosophically. This kind of romantic film-philosophical


41

approach therefore searches for the most apt means to foster a productive reversal of the traditional philosophical disenfranchisement of film. Romantic film-philosophy, however, does not thereby avoid or retreat from ‘theory’; it pursues it, rather, in a different style and manner. Instead of applying a readymade framework or theoretical discourse to the film – a discourse or framework that remains unquestioned by the film it puts into question – it develops its claims immanently from the particularities of films themselves, interweaving theory and criticism into a complex but fragmentary whole (as we find in Cavell’s work, in which fragments on film are as essential to composing the theoretical whole in which such fragments find their most apt expression). It does not attempt to replace or supplant philosophical film theory; rather, it offers an alternative way of relating theory and practice, concept and artwork, philosophy and film. It takes seriously the idea that film is a medium of thought, and that the film-philosophy relationship is one that necessarily involves a risky but unavoidable translation between different media. For the experience of film does not involve an indifferent relation between static relata that remain unchanged by their encounter (the use of a film, for example, to exemplify a theoretical point); rather, it invokes a mutual becoming, a dynamic, transformative relationship in which the relata in question are profoundly altered by their very engagement, opening them up to new relations with each other as well as with other things (as in any good relationship). If we recall the wonderful scene from Godard’s Vivre sa vie with which I began, we might begin to see the relationship between Nana and the philosopher in a new light. Nana, the cinema or ‘unwitting philosopher’, becomes philosophical in the very gesture of engaging philosophy in mutual reflection, while philosophy finds a new voice by relinquishing its desire to silence the everyday, by abdicating its mastery and control, thus reinventing what philosophy can become once it no longer defines itself as the other of art. The philosophy immanent within film is revealed, while philosophy is transformed by the experience of alternative cinematic worlds. Indeed, film’s philosophical vocation, we might say, lies in its capacity to vividly disclose forgotten or obliterated aspects of experience, making us receptive to difference and sensitive to possibility, thereby expanding the distinctive aspects of world that we can experience and to which we can thoughtfully respond. Romantic film-philosophy thus attempts to transform the philosophy-film relationship from one of hierarchy, domination, or control to one of mutual reflection, engagement, and creative transformation.

42


It reverses the disenfranchisement of film, dismantling the labyrinth constructed to keep art (and film) at bay, and promotes the kind of aesthetic world-disclosure that might contribute to the invention of new forms of life.

Disclosing new worlds As part of this re-enfranchisement of film, romantic film-philosophy also seeks to revive the sundered link between aesthetics and politics that has unfortunately been left in abeyance since Bordwell and Carroll’s announcement of the ‘post-Theory’ turn in film studies. Although there are laudable efforts today to theorise race, gender, and ethical questions in relation to film, there is little recognition of the ways in which aesthetics and politics have been intimately entwined ever since film and philosophy first began their fateful relationship. Here we might mention the abrupt dismissal of the problem of ‘ideology’ from contemporary film theory as having corrupted previous (Continental-inspired) attempts to theorise film. This dismissal is frequently expressed as a resistance towards the attribution of any significant cultural–ideological role to film theory; for such an attribution would be incompatible, so the story goes, with the theoretical objectivity or dispassionate rationality of philosophical inquiry (see Bordwell and Carroll, 1996; Allen and Smith, 1997). While it is true that there was a tendency in the older paradigm of film theory to instrumentalise film, at times, in the name of ideology critique, contemporary ‘post-theory’ film theory – or the emerging analytic-cognitivist paradigm – avoids serious reflection on the ideological dimensions of film, or indeed on the practice of film theory itself (save for ritualised polemical attacks on the vices of ‘Grand Theory’). One way in which romantic film-philosophy might retrieve the ethico-political dimensions of film, I suggest, is by way of the idea of aesthetic disclosure: the meaning-disclosing potential of film to thematise novel or intolerable aspects of modern culture, and to reveal new or forgotten aspects of modern experience via the construction of virtual cinematic worlds. For it is in the affective engagement elicited by our immersive experience of cinematic virtual worlds that the ethico-political possibilities of cinema come to life. Film is essential to promoting new forms of meaning-making; of aesthetic world-disclosure that shift and expand our horizons of meaning, generating forms of aesthetic experience that both reflect and transform our subjective orientation in the world. Here again it is not necessary to have a fully-fledged


43

theory of ideology, ethics, or of politics that could be handily applied to film in order to either elaborate the critical reflection of which a film might be capable, or to reveal the kind of ideological dimensions it may, wittingly or unwittingly, evoke. It is enough, rather, to draw upon the ways in which certain films disclose either what is intolerable, traumatic, or disturbing in our world today (as in Michael Haneke’s films), or else to experiment with the aesthetic disclosure of alternative ways of thinking and feeling, acting and being, in our relations with nature and culture (as in Terrence Malick’s films). Romantic film-philosophy, then, remains faithful to the idea that art can be transformative; that it not only reveals what modern experience is but also how it might be transfigured and reinvented. In this way, it might foster the retrieval of an ethico-political dimension to thinking and writing about film that remains sadly muted and silenced today – another telling aspect of the contemporary philosophical disenfranchisement of film.

Watching, listening, and responding Film’s philosophical disenfranchisement, however, cannot simply be reversed by fiat. It is a matter, rather, of engaging the other in dialogue; in an open-ended conversation that might enable philosophy to transform itself through its engagement with cinematic art. From this point of view, we might regard films as invitations – or even provocations – to thought, to which we can then respond, or not, in different ways, if we can find the right words. We need not apply a readymade philosophical framework to a film, one that allows the philosopher to maintain his or her theoretical mastery over the ambiguous, seductive, or open-ended work of art – film’s inherent resistance to theory. Rather, we need to be open and receptive to the ‘thinking’ that films themselves unfold via image narrative, and style, and remain committed to finding thoughtprovoking ways of translating this thinking into a fitting philosophical idiom, perhaps even one that might subtly transform what we take ‘doing philosophy’ (of film) to mean. The romantic critic or theorist thus becomes a kind of translator, or better, a ‘medium’ or mediator between different media of thought: cinematic and philosophical, aesthetic and conceptual, poetic and political. In this idealised marriage of thought and feeling, philosophy and art, one might well ask what film could teach philosophy. Perhaps, above all, that philosophy’s virtue, as Cavell remarks, is responsiveness; or that re-enfranchising film means philosophy should begin to watch, listen, and learn.14

44


Notes 1. The works by Frampton (2006) and Mulhall (2002) are recent examples of such an approach. I would also include the work of Cavell (1979, 1996), Deleuze (1985, 1989), and Bersani and Dutoit (2004) as exemplary cases. 2. This theme concerning the tension between philosophical reflection and everyday action is well expressed by Eran Dorfman in terms that recall Brice Parain’s dialogue with Nana: ‘Philosophy is the refusal (or the inability) just to live things, the necessity of looking at them and talking about them. Philosophy is the mourning of the failure to live, look, and talk at the same time’ (2004, p.169). Le Mépris gives this theme further complexity by filming such a philosophical dialogue, and showing how Nana’s questioning of this dichotomy between (philosophical) speech and (thoughtful) action is an essential possibility of cinema that shapes its fraught relationship with philosophy. 3. For a critical overview, see Wartenberg (2007, pp.15–31). 4. By ‘naturalistic’ I am referring to philosophical naturalism, which can be defined as the view that takes all phenomena to be explicable according to natural causes; hence science and philosophy are united in their quest for general theories that provide causal explanations of relevant phenomena. 5. I discuss the relationship between the analytic/Continental debate and contemporary philosophy of film in Sinnerbrink (2010). 6. See the recent voluminous reference text edited by Livingston and Plantinga (2009). 7. See Simon Critchley’s recent discussion of the pitfalls facing attempts at a philosophical reading of Samuel Beckett’s Film (2007). 8. Plato, Republic, 607b5–6. 9. We should also add, against the feminine, since one of the dangers Plato/ Socrates identifies with poetry is that it appeals to the ‘feminine’ (nonrational) part of the soul. 10. Much contemporary philosophy of film defines itself as ‘anti-ideological’, dismissing film theory’s formerly critical approach to Hollywood (its focus on gender, sexuality, class, ideology, and so on), and replacing this with a cognitivist-naturalistic investigation of popular film genres and their narrative cueing of innate emotional dispositions (see Grodal, 2009; Plantinga, 2009). What is lost in this approach is the philosophical questioning of this commonsensical affirmation of the status quo, and the opportunity to theoretically investigate film’s complex relationship with prevailing forms of ideology. 11. One criticism of Mulhall’s admirable Heideggerian-Nietzschean reading of Ridley Scott’s Alien (2002) is that it overlooks the film’s ideologico-political dimensions. There is a clear ‘class conflict’ parable at play on board the Nostromo – the Conradian ‘colonialist’ choice of name for the spacecraft being significant – as well as a pointed critique of the dehumanizing instrumentalisation of the crew by ‘The Company’ (the true predatory parasite or self-reproductive ‘Alien’ of the story). 12. See, for example, Kaja Silverman’s (2003, pp.323–42) fine discussion of Malick’s The Thin Red Line. Silverman draws on Heidegger’s existential analysis of ‘being-toward-death’, understood as ‘more a way of inhabiting the earth


45

than leaving it’, in order to discuss Private Witt’s [James Caviezel’s] decision ‘to live ‘towards’ his finitude through his early meditation upon his own death’. Her essay is cited favourably by Bersani and Dutoit (2004, pp.177–8), who nonetheless discuss the film as opening up an ethic of openness towards the relationality of all beings that avoids specific references to philosophers (like Heidegger), and seeks to elaborate the film’s ‘philosophical’ senses – its rendering visible of the invisible world – via its aesthetic-cinematic qualities. 13. It is worth nothing that another recent filmic meditation on film, desire, and the unravelling of a couple – David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) – concludes with an enigmatic screening of the tragic myth of cinema and its possible demise (and also ends with the word, ‘Silencio!’). That there is some subterranean recollection of Godard’s Le Mépris in Mulholland Drive is suggested not only by the ‘Silencio’ reference but also by the recurrence of the name ‘Camilla’ in both films (Camilla Rhodes and Camilla Javal); two enigmatic characters who share an ambiguous proximity (in opposing ways) to the destructive dimensions of Hollywood film. My thanks go to Daniel Ross for alerting me to this connection. 14. As Havi Carel reminds us, philosophy is not the solitary pursuit of atomised individuals but a communal practice of dialogue, without which philosophical utterances and texts ‘would not make sense’: ‘This view is necessitated by the idea that we must listen and be listened to in order to do philosophy. Philosophy cannot be done completely alone, because it is an intersubjective practice constituted through reciprocal listening and speaking’ (2004, p.234). Let me acknowledge this philosophical community by thanking Havi Carel and Greg Tuck for their thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

Bibliography Allen, R. and Smith, M., 1997. ‘Introduction: Film Theory and Philosophy’. Film Theory and Philosophy. R. Allen and M. Smith, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.1–35. Baggini, J. 2003. ‘Alien Ways of Thinking: Mulhall’s On Film’. Film-Philosophy, vol, 7, no. 24. August. [online] http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol-2003/ n24baggini [Accessed 1 May 2008]. Bersani, L. and Dutoit, U., 2004. Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity. London: British Film Institute. Bordwell, D. and Carroll, N., eds, 1996. Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Carel, H., 2004. ‘Philosophy as Listening: The Lessons of Psychoanalysis’. What Philosophy Is. H. Carel and D. Gamez, eds. London: Continuum, pp.225–35. Carroll, Noël, 1996. ‘Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment’. Post-Theory. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, eds. Madison: University of Wisconsin, pp. 37–68. Cavell, S., 1979. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, enlarged edn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cavell, S., 1981. Pursuits of Happiness: the Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

46


—— 1996. Contesting Tears: the Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —— 2007. ‘The Future of Possibility’. Philosophical Romanticism. N. Kompridis, ed. London, New York: Routledge, pp. 21–31. Critchley, S., 2005. ‘Calm – On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line’. Film as Philosophy: Essays on Cinema after Wittgenstein and Cavell. R. Read and J. Goodenough, eds. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.133–148. —— 2007. ‘To be or not to be is not the question: On Beckett’s Film’. FilmPhilosophy, vol. 11, no. 2, pp.108–21. [online] http://www.film-philosophy. com/2007v11n2/Critchley.pdf; [accessed 31 August 2007]. Danto, A.C., 1986. ‘The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art’. The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. New York: Columbia University Press, pp.1–22. Deleuze, G., 1985 [1983]. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —— 1989 [1985]. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by H. Tomlinson and R. Galatea. London: Athlone Press. Dorfman, E., 2004. ‘Philosophy as an “As”’. What Philosophy Is. H. Carel and D. Gamez, eds. London: Continuum, pp.168–77. Falzon, C., 2002. Philosophy Goes to the Movies: An Introduction to Philosophy. London, New York: Routledge. Frampton, D., 2006. Filmosophy. London: Wallflower Press. Grodal, T., 2009. Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kompridis, N., 2006a. Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory Between Past and Future. Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press. —— 2006b. ‘Introduction: Re-Inheriting Romanticism’. N. Kompridis, ed. Philosophical Romanticism. London: Routledge, pp.1–17. Litch, M. M., 2002. Philosophy Through Film. London, New York: Routledge. Livingston, P., and Plantinga, C., eds, 2009. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. Abingdon, New York: Routledge. Mulhall, S., 2002. On Film. London: Routledge. Plantinga, C., 2009. Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rodowick, D.N. 2007. ‘An Elegy for Theory’. October. 122, Fall, pp.91–109. Rancière, J., 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics. Translated by G. Rockhill. London, New York: Continuum. Silverman, K., 2003. ‘All Things Shining’. Loss: The Politics of Mourning. D. L. Eng and D. Kazanjian. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp.323–42. Sinnerbrink, R., 2010. ‘Disenfranchising Film? On the Analytic-Cognitivist Turn in Film Theory’. Postanalytic and Metacontinental: Crossing Philosophical Divides. J. Williams, J. Reynolds, J. Chase, and E. Mares. London: Continuum, pp.173–88. Smith, M., 2006. ‘Film Art, Argument, and Ambiguity’. Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy. M. Smith and T. E. Wartenberg, eds. Oxford: Blackwell, pp.33–42. Wartenberg, T.E., 2007. Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy. London: Routledge. —— 2008. ‘Philosophy of Film’. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. [online] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/film/ [accessed 25 June 2008].


47

Filmography Alien (Ridley Scott, USA, 1979). L’Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy/France, 1960). Film (Alan Schneider/Samuel Beckett, USA, 1965). Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras, France/Japan, 1959). Le Mépris (Jean-Luc Godard, France/Italy, 1963). The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, USA/Australia, 1999). Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, USA, 2001). Smiles of A Summer Night (Sommarnattens leende) (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1955). The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, USA, 1998). Todo sobre mi madre (Pedro Almódovar, Spain/France, 1999). Vivre sa vie (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1962).

3 Notes on Stanley Cavell and Philosophical Film Criticism Andrew Klevan

As well as being the leading practitioner of philosophical film criticism, Stanley Cavell has sought to explain and elucidate it. This chapter aims to bring together observations by Cavell, often in the form of quotation, from across his many writings on film and aesthetics, especially his more recent work, to note some of the characteristics of philosophical criticism, and to illuminate the value of it.1 I do not think it is Cavell’s intention to erect a special category of philosophical criticism to distinguish it from criticism per se. Indeed, for Cavell much of what we understand and value as criticism has a philosophical flavour. Not only may the criticism of texts be understood as a form of philosophy, but also the philosophy that he most values can be understood as a form of criticism of texts (philosophical or otherwise). Much of what follows may in fact be a way of revisiting (perhaps as a way of reviving) the somewhat lost art of academic criticism, coming to see it again in the light of Cavell’s (philosophical) understandings and in comparison to other forms of analysis more commonly in use today. His demonstrations and demarcations have partly arisen in an endeavour to articulate explicitly what criticism may offer in an academic environment (especially Film Studies) increasingly unfamiliar with it. Having said this, Cavell’s form of criticism does have a more noticeable philosophical frame of mind. Yet, this is not necessarily because of the two commonly cited associations with philosophy that are important in Cavell’s work. His writing conjoins film and philosophy, in the sense of seeing how the philosophical ideas of, for example, Martin Heidegger or Ludwig Wittgenstein may illuminate films. It also understands film as philosophy, a currently favoured distinction, where films are seen as actively philosophical, discovering and dramatising 48

Notes on Stanley Cavell and Philosophical Film Criticism 49

philosophical matters for themselves. Indeed, a film’s capacity to be philosophical allows it to join hands with the ‘great’ works of philosophy. Nevertheless, what is philosophical in his criticism has more to do with an approach (to texts), let us say a way of approaching them, and a way of handling them, and each of the sections below isolates an aspect of this approach. The following quotation by Cavell from ‘What Becomes of Thinking on Film?’ may give us some guidance here and stands as a touchstone to the discussion that follows: The question is why one is stopped. It is a question that marks something I think of as philosophical criticism, given the extent to which I think of philosophy as inherently a matter of stopping and turning and going back over (call this conversation rather than linear, monological argument). It is a portrait of philosophy I find stretching from the events in Plato’s Myth of the Cave in The Republic to the practices recorded in Wittgenstein’s Investigations, with their depictions of being lost, stopped, and the recurrent demand to turn and to return. It goes with a view I have advanced on a number of occasions, of philosophy as responsiveness, as not speaking first (Cavell, 2005c, p.182).

Discovering When Stanley Cavell’s work is discussed, it is usually his general topics, or concepts, that receive attention, for example, acknowledgement, scepticism, perfectionism, remarriage, and romanticism. The accounts tend to ignore his acuity and perspicacity as a critic, and the specificity of his insights into particular works (or these insights are seen as merely illustrative). Whenever I reflect on his body of work on film, I see a series of film moments lining up. I see the Marquis addressing his audience on the steps of the château, with Schumacher half way down the steps between the Marquis and the audience in Rules of the Game. I see Mr Deeds lying on his back, on his bed, playing his tuba in Mr Deeds Goes to Town. I see Stella, in that black dress, back to us, facing the door, as her husband and daughter leave her alone at Christmas in Stella Dallas. I see Mike carrying Tracy from the swimming pool in The Philadelphia Story. And I see Stefan covering his face with his hands after finishing the letter from Lisa in Letter From An Unknown Woman.2 Cavell’s interpretations do not always begin with these moments but when he reaches them, he allows them to stop him, hold him, and prevent him from going on. In Cities of Words he writes: ‘What I call

50


slow reading is meant…to propose a mode of philosophical attention in which you are prepared to be taken by surprise, stopped, thrown back as it were upon the text’ (Cavell, 2004a, p.15). Despite Cavell’s overarching thematic and aesthetic concerns, ultimately his discussion of moments shows that he does not presume there is a self-evident way to approach a film or assume what a revelatory instance might look like.3 None of these moments obviously called for the attention he gave them, and certainly not for the type of attention, or the particularity. Nor did any of them announce the profit that might result from the attention. The promise of a ‘premature unity’ prevents films from opening up in unexpected ways. In his ‘Introductory note to “The Investigations’’ Everyday Aesthetics of Itself’, Cavell writes that, ‘The philosophy I seek is not one that promises an always premature unity but one that allows me in principle to get from anywhere, any present desire, to anywhere else that I find matters to me’ (Cavell, 2004b, p.19). In this same essay, he announces ‘[t]he liberation’ he felt from reading Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, namely ‘its demonstration, or promise, that I can think philosophically about anything I want, or have, to think about, not merely what I am able to formulate in a particular way (which is what so much of philosophy as it was conveyed to me in school sought to impress me with)’ (Cavell, 2004b, p.18). Wittgenstein warns us about systems coming first and in ‘The Wittgensteinian Event’, Cavell writes about ‘violently asserting a singularity…rather than… making our words and deeds our own’ (Cavell, 2005a, p.201). In ‘What Becomes of Thinking on Film?’ he says, ‘It’s important to me to say that philosophy can be discovered. Indeed what I want to say is that there is no philosophy unless it is discovered. Otherwise, it’s just something that takes place in a classroom’ (Cavell, 2005c, p.190). Unlike most contemporary forms of textual scholarship which derive meaning from a work’s origins, its historical, cultural, or national context, Cavell’s criticism emphasises those meanings that are discovered during this moment of engagement with the text, and with each other (through dialogue, during teaching).4 It tends not to rely on information or facts (found, for example, by searching archives) in order to propose a ‘truth’, and instead stresses ‘responsiveness’ as a way of learning (about something). Consequently meaning remains open. In ‘Two Cheers for Romance’ Cavell quotes Charlotte’s words to Jerry in Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, USA, 1942) ‘“Some man who’ll make me happy? I’ve been laboring under the delusion that you and I were so in sympathy, so one, that you’d know without being asked what would make me


happy”’. Cavell notes that Bette Davis is ‘saying [these] words, slowly, as if seeking to fathom the origin of each of them’ (Cavell, 2005b, p.163). The suggestion is that intelligent films and performers are in search of meaning (waiting perhaps for help, from you, or me). Moreover, interpretations will tend towards the metaphorical or towards philosophical abstraction in matters such as self, identity, perception, mind and body (as distinct from culturally specific accounts of these matters). For Cavell, It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, USA, 1934) becomes not about The Depression of the 1930s, or about literally going hungry, but an occasion to ask ‘what it is we as a people are truly depressed by, what hunger it is from which we all are faint?’ (Cavell, 1981, p.6).

Revealing Cavell is especially alive to those moments that seem to be ordinary or straightforward, and which he reveals to be quietly mysterious. In Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow, Cavell has called this the ‘missable’ (Cavell, 2005a, p.11). In one of his early essays, ‘The Thought of Movies’, he writes: ‘I understand it to be, let me say, a natural vision of film that every motion and station, in particular every human posture and gesture, however glancing, has its poetry, or you may say its lucidity’ (Cavell, 2005b, p.96). Cavell further mentions ‘those apparently insignificant moments in whose power a part of the power of film rests’ [my emphasis] (Cavell, 2005b, p.94). Any ‘motion and station’, any ‘posture and gesture’ may hold a wealth of significance, and further may adjust our way of seeing everything else in the film. It is a possibility of film, because of its ontology, that human behaviour may integrate, suitably and concretely, into the wider dramatic environment. This enhances continuity and means that the significance of words, expressions, postures and gestures, even reasonably prominent ones, pass us by. The ordinary lucidity of film dramatisation means significance may be readily available but not immediately easy to see (or hear). Let us take the example of dialogue. Typically, for Cavell, lines may be ordinary or casual but contain significance. In Pursuits of Happiness he writes, ‘words that on one viewing pass, and are meant to pass, without notice, as unnoticeably trivial, on another resonate and declare their implication in a network of significance’ (Cavell, 1981, p.11). Cavell asks himself what becomes of words on film. In Now, Voyager, Charlotte asks Dr Jacquith if he can help her, to which he replies, ‘You don’t need

52


my help’. This is mysterious to Cavell because ‘he is not refusing her plea; but if he is granting it, why isn’t his answer a flat lie? She patently does need his help’ (Cavell, 2005b, p.299). In ‘The Image of the Psychoanalyst in Film’, he takes the line to be ‘a peculiar compression, meaning something like, “I’ll help you come to see that you are not helpless.” …the writing requires a kind of Hollywood abbreviation or allegorizing in narration that is hard to characterize’ (Cavell 2005b, p.299). He writes of the couple in ‘The Capra Moment’ as having an ‘unreadiness to become explicit’ (Cavell 2005b, p.139). One of the best examples of abbreviation might be from A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood, USA, 1935), discussed in Cavell’s essay ‘Nothing Goes without Saying’. A small cabin on a boat is filling with more and more people, piling on top of each other, ever more contorted. A woman appears to Groucho with a portable beauty tray hung before her and asks: ‘Do you want a manicure?’ Groucho replies: ‘No. Come on in.’ – simply that, ‘No. Come on in.’ – quickly delivered and seemingly a rather straightforward invitation to continue the mounting chaos. This is what Cavell says of those four words: I take for granted that some will be satisfied to suppose that he means, fixatedly: “No, but I want something else you could provide.” Let us suppose, however, that he has the poise with meaning…to mean or imply at least also the following: “No, but there are lots of others here; perhaps they want what you suggest”; and “Nobody really wants a manicure, but if that’s all you’re offering, I’ll take it”; and “No, but come in since you’re here and we’ll see what happens.” (Cavell 2005b, p.191) The apparent lack of substance – ‘No. Come on in.’ – belies the range of actual implications. It is not simply that its implications might be lost (on us), but that there appears to be nothing to find. Although this is a possibility for all art forms, it comes naturally to film: let us say that it is film’s ordinary way of being. In Cities of Words, Cavell writes about a ‘glory natural to the moving picture camera, that the most apparently insignificant repetitions, turnings, pauses, and yieldings of human beings are as interesting to it as is the beauty or the science of movement’ (Cavell 2004a, p.199). In ‘The Cinephiliac Moment’, Christian Keathley cites Walter Benjamin’s observation from the excellent section 13 of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, that ‘the camera introduces us to unconscious optics as psychoanalysis does to unconscious


impulses’ (Keathley, 2004 quoting Benjamin, 1969, p.237). Keathley explains: Benjamin repeatedly cited [Sigmund] Freud, and he regularly used psychoanalysis as a way to comparatively describe photographic images and their effects… Just as Freud’s theories ‘isolated and made analyzable things which heretofore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception’, the photographic apparatus, Benjamin argued, similarly focused on ‘hidden details of familiar objects,’ revealing ‘entirely new formations of the subject’… Freud believed that both dreams and the banal recollections fixed in our minds like snapshots are, in fact, emotionally-laden memories which contain, in a form radically reorganized by condensation and displacement, all a patient’s crucial psychical information. Unlocking these dreams or ‘screen memories’ (as he called them) could only be carried through the patient’s distracted free association/stream of consciousness monologue. Freud would advise his patients: ‘You will be tempted to say to yourself: “This or that has no connection here, or it is quite unimportant, or it is nonsensical, so it cannot be necessary to mention it.” Never give in to these objections, but mention it even if you feel a disinclination against it, or indeed just because of this’. (Keathley, 2004 quoting Freud, 1963, p.147 and Benjamin, 1969, pp.235, 236) Cavell too draws the connection between cinema and psychoanalysis: For all the fascinating intimacies between psychoanalysis and film – both of them originating in the last decade of the nineteenth century; both bound up, explicitly or implicitly, with the vulnerability and expressiveness of women; each arguably responsible for a greater effect on the human being’s perception of itself than any other science or art of the intervening century; neither able to gain the respectability of a stable position within the academic world, in some part because, I dare say, of the unexhausted subversive reserves of each. (Cavell 2004a, p.236) He goes on to draw the connection with philosophy and the following passage is so revealing of Cavell’s conception of philosophy it is also worth repeating at length: [N]either psychoanalysis nor cinema has received the measure of attention from philosophy that each calls out for (of course there are exceptions), each calling into question whatever philosophy

54


had hitherto known as representation and reality, pleasure and pain, understanding and ignorance, remembering and imagination, intention and desire…[Freud writes] in Chapter 4 of The Interpretation of Dreams, of being led to feel “that the interpretation of dreams may enable us to draw conclusions as to the structure of our mental apparatus which we have hoped for in vain from philosophy.” The ambivalence may be read…equally [to mean] that our vain waiting for philosophy is now to be replaced by the positive work of something else, call it psychoanalysis; and/or that our waiting for philosophy is at last no longer vain, that philosophy has now been fulfilled in the form of psychoanalysis… I am rather attracted to the latter, stronger side of the ambivalence, which takes psychoanalysis as some sort of transformation of philosophy – as if, after a millennium or so in which philosophy, as established in Greece, carried on the idea of philosophy as a way of life, constituted in view of the…task of caring for the self, call this philosophy’s therapeutic mission, and another millennium or so in which philosophy has seemed prepared to discard this piece of its mission, psychoanalysis has discovered methods that can make good on philosophy’s originating goal of liberation…methods…about saying whatever comes to mind, and about free association, and about interventions guided by the progress of transference, which may appear to be anti-philosophical methods, teasing, not training, reason with its dialectics. (Cavell 2004a, pp.236–7) From this point of view, one way of understanding Cavell’s philosophical criticism is as a form of psychoanalytic criticism. Cavell is not the first or only thinker to bring cinema and psychoanalysis together but more often than not their meeting has entailed specific psychoanalytic interpretations of films – oedipal complexes, death drives, or mirror phases – or else provided psychoanalytic conceptions of the film medium – suture, the gaze, fetish object, or screen as mirror. Quite often, this has amounted to film, a film or the spectator appearing fixed or fixated. Cavell sees the relationship between film and psychoanalysis more flexibly as regarding the process of interpretation: interpreting films, as one would the self, therapeutically so to speak. Keathley informs us that Freud, in ‘On Beginning the Treatment’, further provided a metaphor to help the patient adopt the desired approach: ‘Say whatever goes through your mind. Act as though, for instance, you were a traveller sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views you see outside’ (Benjamin quoting Freud, 1963, p.47 in Keathley,


2004). This might be equally good advice for film interpretation. Can we recall those moments that just catch our eye, but are passing, escaping, possibly lost? Can we bring them to mind, take a hold of them, and describe them? These moments become the beginning of our questioning and investigation (of the film and our self), and the beginning of finding words for our experience. What was it I saw there? Why did it touch me? Why does it leave a memory?

Describing and writing We may sit before a moment in a film with only a vague intuition of its value and significance. What do we do with it? Where do we go from here? In ‘The Wittgensteinian Event’, Cavell emphasises the role of becoming lost in Wittgenstein’s Investigations – Wittgenstein writes: ‘A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about”’ (Wittgenstein, 2006, p.42; Cavell, 2005a, p.201) – and this often takes the form of not being able to find words. In A Capra Moment, Cavell writes, ‘I knew afresh each time I viewed the film that this moment [a moment where a man and a woman, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, playing Peter and Ellie, in Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night are walking away from us down an empty country road] played something like an epitomizing role in the film’s effect upon me, but I remained unable to find words for it sufficient to include in my critical account of the effect’ (Cavell, 2005b, p.136). He writes that it was years before he found he was ready to say something about this moment, but one day, suddenly, he could hardly keep up with the thoughts he was having about it. Cavell devotes a whole essay to simply this moment but he does not only provide an interpretation, he also articulates his involvement: the sense of being lost, of needing to be lost, and then of finding himself in relation to the film. The very act of writing, and re-writing, especially through description, is a means of revelation (recall Freud’s instruction to describe ‘the changing views you see outside’). Because film has a special capacity to embody the metaphorical in the literal, in the physical and in the real, we may describe the actual in such a way that discloses the symbolic. For Cavell, it is not simply a matter of capturing the film, clearly, finding the apposite choice of word, providing the accurate description, or portraying it vividly. Equally important is the journey to the point: reflecting the process of engagement, the thoughts yet to find suitable articulation, and the difficulties of acknowledgment and wording. This is particularly true for that which we find remarkable, especially if the remarkable is something that seems rather ordinary, as it seems to be

56


for Wittgenstein or as it often seems to be in film (perhaps somebody walking, talking, or turning). Simon Glendinning discusses this in his essay ‘Philosophy as Nomadism’: [I]n my view it is actually the experienced inadequacy of the response that is more relevant, more originary to the opening of philosophy… we might say that philosophy begins every time we find our words as failing to come to terms with the difficulty of reality. I find that my everyday words seem not up to expressing what I now find remarkable…[but] in many cases inexactness may be exactly what we need. (Glendinning, 2004, pp.159–60)

Returning Moments turn Cavell around and allow him to go on in a new direction; they take him to somewhere he never thought he would go. Frequently, however, they take him back to somewhere he has been before, to see it anew, as if he had never been there. He returns, repeatedly. He has discussed the closing moments of Now, Voyager in at least six different books or essays – famously in ‘Ugly Duckling, Funny Butterfly’ (1996), again in ‘Two Cheers for Romance’, again in ‘The Advent of Videos’, again in ‘The Image of the Psychoanalyst in Film’, again in ‘The Good of Film’ (all collected in 2005b), again in Cities of Words (2004a). This shows the need to return: he cannot let go of a moment, the moment will not let him go. It will not let him (come to) rest. Appropriately, returning is a topic Cavell regularly returns to, as do his favourite philosophers. Yet, Cavell’s work does not simply discuss returning, it dramatises it. Wittgenstein writes that ‘what dawns here lasts only as long as I am occupied with the object in a particular way’, and Cavell cites this on a number of occasions (for example, Cavell, 2005b, p.142). Among other things, this suggests something intimate and fragile, that the secrets of objects will only be revealed when we genuinely become ‘occupied’ with them, stay with them, and spend time with them, and when we cease to be (there) they will disappear. We may never see the object in quite this ‘particular way’ again. Equally, however, different things will ‘dawn’ if we return to address the same object differently. We may need to be in a certain frame of mind, or a certain mood, to appreciate something. Cavell refers to this as our ‘evanescent readiness’ for a moment (Cavell, 2005b, p.142). In Cities of Words he writes: ‘Philosophers seem perpetually to be going back over something, something most sane


people would feel had already been discussed to death’ (Cavell, 2004a, p.15). You have to return, he goes on, because ‘a text worth reading carefully, or perpetually, is inexhaustible. You always leave it prematurely’ (Cavell, 2004a, p.15). Cavell quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of his favourite essayists, from The Poet: ‘“The highest minds of the world have never ceased to explore the double meaning, or shall I say the quadruple, or the centuple, or much more manifold meaning, of every sensuous fact”’ (Cavell, 2004a, p.28). Something missed, something not yet said, and words not yet found. Cavell sometimes seems to be repeating the same point again, but it has a subtly changed emphasis, or a slightly altered aspect. It appears the same and different. Returning to describe the moment slightly differently with new words, a new meaning now emerges. Jacques Derrida’s explanation, in Violence and Metaphysics, of Emmanuel Levinas’ style seems applicable also to Cavell’s work: ‘It proceeds with the infinite insistence of waves on a beach: return and repetition, always of the same wave against the same shore, in which, however, as each return recapitulates itself, it also infinitely renews and enriches itself’ (Derrida 1978, p.103 fn7 quoted in Glendinning, 2007 p.151). Not having one route through a text, not having a clear beginning and an end, but rather returning to the same point from different directions brings to mind a comment by Wittgenstein that is quoted by Gasking and Jackson, two students of his, in a fascinating little essay entitled ‘Wittgenstein as a Teacher’.5 Gasking and Jackson talk of the considerable difficulty in following Wittgenstein’s lectures and it arose from the fact that it was perplexing to see where all the repetitive, concrete, detailed talk would lead. Wittgenstein gives the account of his procedure as they recall it: In teaching you philosophy I’m like a guide showing you how to find your way round London. I have to take you through the city from north to south, from east to west, from Euston to the embankment and from Piccadilly to the Marble Arch. After I have taken you many journeys through the city, in all sorts of directions, we shall have passed through any given street a number of times – each time traversing the street as part of a different journey. At the end of this you will know London; you be able to find your way about like a born Londoner. (Gasking and Jackson, 1967, p.51) (Incidentally, Wittgenstein finishes his London analogy by saying, ‘Of course, a good guide will take you though the more important streets

58


more often than he takes you down side streets; a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I’m a rather bad guide’.) David Schalkwyk in his essay ‘Wittgenstein’s “Imperfect Garden”’, discusses Wittgenstein’s attachment to map metaphors, emphasising his desire to dispose of the ladder (giving one a view from above) and embark on an earthbound journey which criss-crosses in every direction (Schalkwyck, 2004, p. 71). Glendinning in ‘Philosophy as Nomadism’ speaks of ‘inhabitation’, inhabiting the text, and moving around, rather than adopting ‘a method that will assure us that we are on the ‘straight highway’ to the end’ (Glendinning, 2004, p.162). In this spirit then, we shall have passed through any given film moment a number of times – each time traversing the moment as part of a different journey (through the film) – and we will know not only the moment but the whole film (not just this or that street, but how they come together to make London). Further, given that we will learn not only about London but also about cities, we will learn not only about this film but also about film itself. Indeed, Cavell is always interested in how the moment relates to the film as a film: because understanding how the style of this moment works (successfully) is a way of understanding how this film uses the medium (successfully), that is, how it reflects upon the medium.

Investigating Most of the writers that Cavell admires, such as Wittgenstein, Thoreau, Emerson, Freud, are trying to get us back somewhere. They teach us that we have ‘already been at the place we are trying to get to’ (Cavell, 2005a, p.198). Wittgenstein wants us to return our words to their ordinary homes; Freud understands that the finding of an object is in fact the re-finding of it. It is a usefully backwards idea of progression. The sense of us returning to the same moment, returning to a street from another journey, is one way of saying that we still do not yet know that with which we are familiar. This is caught in Wittgenstein’s perpetually beguiling observation, and one of Cavell’s favourite touchstones in the work, point 89 of the Investigations: ‘We want to understand something that is already in plain view. For this is what we seem in some sense not to understand’ (Wittgenstein, 2006, p.36). Film continuously reminds us of this because it presents people and places in ‘plain view’.6 Like Poe’s purloined letter, we miss significance not because it is concealed but because it is right before us (Poe, 1978). I am reminded here of a favourite Sherlock Holmes reference of mine, one that I am eager to


present to first year film students, undergraduate and postgraduate. In The Red Headed League, one of the stories in the collection entitled The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the great detective is, in Wittgensteinian parlance, seeing aspects of a new client, Mr Jebez Wilson. Among other claims, Holmes announces that he has done manual labour. Why? Because he notices that his right hand is rather larger than his left with the muscles more developed. Holmes also notes that he has done a lot of writing lately because as he exclaims: ‘“What else can be indicated by that right cuff so very shiny for five inches, and the left one with the smooth patch near the elbow where you rest it upon the desk?”’ Mr Wilson then responds with an important line, ‘“I thought at first you had done something clever, but I see there was nothing in it, after all”’ (Conan Doyle, 1981, p.177). Nothing in it. In another story – A Scandal in Bohemia – Dr Watson says, ‘“When I hear you give your reasons… the thing always appears to me to be so ridiculously simple”’ (Conan Doyle, 1981, p.162). There might be fruitful correspondences between the observant film viewer and the detective/investigator and the philosopher (philosophical investigations no less). In ‘Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method’, Carlo Ginzburg tells a story which links Holmes’ detection, Freud’s psychoanalysis and 19th century art historian Giovanni Morelli’s method of attributing paintings. Each of them is attracted to the significance of minor details and the most ordinary of clues, or rather they recognised the importance of the apparently insignificant as a possible clue. Ginzburg explains how for Morelli, museums are full of wrongly attributed paintings and assigning them correctly is often very difficult, since often they are unsigned, or painted over, or in poor repair. To do it, said Morelli, one should abandon the convention of concentrating on the most obvious characteristics of the paintings, such as the smile of Leonardo’s women, for these could most easily be imitated. Ginzburg elucidates Morelli’s alternative method: Instead one should concentrate on minor details, especially those least significant in the style of the painter’s own school: earlobes, fingernails, shapes of fingers and toes… Freud came across Morelli’s writings before his work on psychoanalysis [and in his essay ‘The Moses of Michelangelo’ writes]: ‘It seems to me that his method of inquiry is closely related to the technique of psychoanalysis. It, too, is accustomed to divine secret and concealed things from despised or unnoticed features, from the rubbish heap, as it were, of our observations.’… Freud was a doctor; Morelli had a degree in

60


medicine; Conan Doyle had been a doctor before settling down to write. In all three cases we can invoke the model of medical semiotics…the discipline which permits diagnosis, though the disease cannot be directly observed, on the basis of superficial symptoms or signs. (Ginzburg, 1980, pp.7–12)7 It is worth making clear to avoid being misconstrued that adopting this form of investigation is not a matter of treating films as puzzles, or overvaluing overtly puzzling films, but rather a matter of investigating the ordinary. Finding what one may have missed is not a game. Indeed experience lost or missed can be a matter of life and death, as it is in Cavell’s account of Henry James’ story The Beast in the Jungle in Cities of Words which he allows to join hands with Max Ophuls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman in his understanding of the experience of missing out on one’s life (Cavell, 2004a, pp.384–408). Experience lost or missed, Cavell writes in ‘Something Out of The Ordinary’, reveals not exactly that my life is unexamined, but that it is ‘missed by me, lost on me’ (Cavell, 2005a, p.10).

Appreciating For Cavell, it is precisely the simple, the ordinary, the familiar, and the things with which we are intimate that we are always missing. In discussing, in ‘Something Out of the Ordinary’, what he takes to be a rather uneventful moment of Fred Astaire walking at the beginning of The Band Wagon, he writes that the significance of the fragment could be missed and therefore dismissed as inconsequential (Cavell, 2005a, pp.7–27)8. Missable and dismissable – indeed the failure to appreciate. We may simply miss a moment, it may simply pass us by, but we may also think we have seen a moment, seen all there is to see. One of the most valuable connections Cavell makes in Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow is to relate appreciation, critical appreciation, precisely to that which we are missing. He writes, ‘The work of…criticism is to reveal its object as having yet to achieve its due effect. Something there, despite being fully opened to the senses, has been missed’ (Cavell, 2005a, p.11).9 There is crucially an evaluative dimension to philosophical criticism – indeed this is what constitutes it as criticism as distinct from other forms of analysis – and usually the mode, or mood, is appreciative. This critical dimension is often missing from academic film writing, philosophically minded or otherwise. From this point of view, evaluation is not simply


something one might do, something optional; it is intrinsic to the viewing experience. This is how the text makes sense to us: what it means to us. A viewer feels a work to be deft, tender, or delicate or perhaps condescending, smug, or arch as much as they feel for a character or their situations (indeed, whether the fiction affects them or communicates to them at all will depend on the quality of the expression). Moreover, one might argue that most films are made to be good, whether they are or not, and appreciated, and these objectives are an integral part of their presentation and address. The tension between a film’s aspiration or potential and its actual achievement is as palpable to a viewer as that generated by plot or narrative. The viewer monitors the success with which the film handles its elements; and this is not of supplementary interest, but of pressing importance every step of the way. It affects the moment-by-moment viewing of the film. For Cavell, engagement with a film is not simply about interpreting it, or excavating more meaning, but appreciating it, and finding the words to praise it. (Should we be so inclined, we may wish to disapprove of a work and find the words to damn it, providing we are ready for the essay that may show us otherwise because, after all, we may have missed something.) Indeed, this is often a prime motivation in choosing to investigate a moment. Cavell begins his discussion of The Band Wagon with Astaire walking on the platform because he writes that it ‘singled me out for a response of pleasure’ which he had a ‘compulsion to share’ (Cavell, 2005a, p.26, p.9). He expands on the importance of this response and impulse in ‘The Image of The Psychoanalyst on Film’: It is a requirement I impose on the choices of the films I take…that they be films of cinematic, or say aesthetic, value, by which I mean two things primarily… [the first of which is] that I judge them to be of value (in Kant’s sense of aesthetic value, the test of which is my declaration that they provide me with a pleasure I am compelled to share with others, a judgement I demand that others agree with, knowing that my subjectivity may be rebuked). (Cavell 2005b: 297)10 We ‘praise’ not only because we feel that we might owe it to the creators of the work but because of this ‘compulsion to share’. It is worth closing with this point because it tends to be a forgotten reason, in the academy at least, for why we might wish to speak and write about pieces of art. I choose this moment to discuss because I value it and you may value it too. You may have missed it, or you sensed it but let it go, or you saw it too – you are not alone.

62


Notes 1. I have discussed Cavell’s work on film in Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film (2000) (especially regarding film ontology) and ‘Guessing the Unseen from the Seen: Stanley Cavell and Film Interpretation’ (especially regarding film interpretation) (2005). I have tried to focus on different aspects in this piece (regarding film criticism). 2. Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, France, 1939); Mr Deeds Goes to Town (Frank Capra, USA, 1936); Stella Dallas (King Vidor, USA, 1937); The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, USA, 1940); Letter From an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls, USA, 1949). 3. To some it may appear that his overall topics or themes, such as the unknown woman or remarriage, are sometimes prior, and direct the analysis (even if they derive initially from the films). I have heard it said that his concept of remarriage, for example, which he discusses in relation to the Hollywood romantic comedies of 1930s and 1940s (most of which were once labelled ‘Screwball’) is too great an imposition on some of the films, or some aspects of them, and only tenuously related. It may sometimes be true that critic and film are out of balance, but in general, I would prefer to say, that Cavell does indeed have his own concerns (they are not standardised, institutionalised or derivative), and that he allows the films to find new ways of analysing and understanding them, and him. Indeed, the film and the critic discover each other’s concerns, and there is no saying where and in what form they will appear. Cavell is alive to how the film works on him. 4. Although his work does also include reference to cultural and historical moments and periods. 5. I am indebted to Robert B. Ray for drawing this essay to my attention. He also discusses the quotation in his introduction to The ABCs of Classic Hollywood (Ray 2008). 6. See Disclosure of The Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film (Klevan, 2000). 7. I am again indebted to Robert B. Ray who suggested I read the work of Ginzburg. Ray mentions him in the Introduction to The ABCs of Classic Cinema (Ray, 2008) and includes a quotation from Ginzburg that is apposite for this essay: ‘I didn’t even consider history because I found it so boring. What changed my mind was a seminar in which [I] was asked to spend a week analyzing only ten lines of a book written by a leading 19th-century historian. It was the slowness that fascinated me. Every phrase, every word had to be dissected for their possible implications…It was not an easy lesson. In my speech, my writing, my judgements about people, I tend to be very quick. I learned the importance of reading and rereading one page, even a single passage, for days, weeks’ (Ray, 2008, p.xviii). 8. See ‘Internalising the Musical’ (Klevan, 2010). 9. Greg Tuck, one of the editors of this volume, has expanded on the matter very interestingly in correspondence with me. He suggests (and I use his words as far as possible) that the notion of appreciating suggests something about the movies’ democratic urge or availability which complicates the understanding of them, held by some, as offering little but ideologically suspect commodity pleasures. The values suggested in this essay propose

Notes on Stanley Cavell and Philosophical Film Criticism 63 a critical practice which is much more active and dialogical, sensual and sensate which Tuck suggests is prompted by the polyvalence and inexhaustibility of certain cinematic moments (especially, perhaps, in ‘Classical Hollywood Cinema’). The relationship between the narrative form of Hollywood cinema, interpretive possibility and the encouragement towards abstract thought is something I discuss at length in Klevan (2005). 10 The second is ‘that I am prepared to account for my insistent pleasure by a work of criticism (brief or extended) which grounds my experience in the details of the object: in a word, I show that the object is, in the sense Walter Benjamin develops in “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” criticizable, we might say interpretable’ (Cavell, 2005b, p.297).

References Benjamin, W., 1969. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. In H. Arendt, ed. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken. Cavell, S., 1981. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ——,1996. Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. ——,2004a. Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ——,2004b. ‘Introductory note to “The Investigations’’ Everyday Aesthetics of Itself’. In J. Gibson and W. Huemer, eds. The Literary Wittgenstein, London: Routledge. ——,2005a. Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ——,2005b. In W. Rothman, ed. Cavell on Film. New York: SUNY. ——2005c. ‘What Becomes of Thinking on Film?’ (Stanley Cavell in conversation with Andrew Klevan)’. In R. Read and J. Goodenough, eds. Film as Philosophy: Essays on Cinema After Wittgenstein and Cavell. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Conan Doyle, A., (1981). The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Derrida, J., 1978. ‘Violence and Metaphysics’. In Writing and Difference. Translated by A. Bass, London: Routledge. Freud, S., ‘The Moses of Michelangelo’. Collected Works, Standard Edition. Vol. XIII [Edition not specified by Ginzberg]. ——1963. ‘On Beginning the Treatment’. Therapy and Technique. New York: W.W.Norton. Gasking, D.A.T. and Jackson, A.C., 1967. ‘Wittgenstein as a Teacher’. In K.T. Fann, ed. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Man and his Philosophy. New Jersey: Humanities Press. Ginzburg, C., 1980. ‘Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method’. History Workshop. 9, Spring. Glendinning, S., 2004. ‘Philosophy as Nomadism’. In H. Carel and D. Gamez, eds. What Philosophy Is. London and New York: Continuum. ——, 2007. In the Name of Phenomenology. Oxford: Routledge. Keathley, C., 2004. ‘The Cinephiliac Moment’. [online] available at: http://www. frameworkonline.com/42ck.htm 12/6/2004

64


Klevan, A., 2000. Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film. Trowbridge: Flicks Books. ——, 2005. ‘Guessing the Unseen from the Seen: Stanley Cavell and Film Interpretation’. In R. Goodman, ed. Contending with Stanley Cavell. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——, 2010. ‘Internalising the Musical’. In T. Brown and J. Walters, eds. Film Moments: Criticism, History, Theory. London: British Film Institute. Poe, E. A., 1978. ‘The Purloined Letter’. In T. Mabbot, ed. Edgar Allen Poe: Collected Works, Volume Three. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Ray, R., 2008. The ABCs of Classic Hollywood. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schalkwyck, D., 2004. ‘Wittgenstein’s “Imperfect Garden”: the Ladders and Labyrinths of Philosophy as Dichtung’. In J. Gibson and W. Huemer, eds. The Literary Wittgenstein, London: Routledge. Wittgenstein, L., 2006, first edition 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell.

Filmography The Band Wagon (Vincente Minnelli, USA, 1953). It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, USA, 1934). Letter From an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls, USA, 1949). Mr Deeds Goes to Town (Frank Capra, USA, 1936). A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood, USA, 1935). Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, USA, 1942). The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, USA, 1940). Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, France, 1939). Stella Dallas (King Vidor, USA, 1937).

4 Broken Glass by the Road: Adorno and a Cinema of Negativity Hamish Ford

German philosopher, musicologist, and leading light of the Frankfurt School for Social Research, Theodor W. Adorno (1903–69) has been frequently ignored or cast as a villain within university Film Studies.1 This is largely due to the heavy historical baggage of Dialectic of Enlightenment, the seminal book he co-authored with Max Horkheimer (first published in 1944), which was highly influential in Humanities departments until backlash in the 1980s and 1990s. Mounting an analysis via Greek mythology of Western modernity to find it has betrayed the Enlightenment’s dual promises of reason and freedom, this central Frankfurt School work casts cinema as a principal star of ‘the culture industry’ – Horkheimer and Adorno’s famous phrase describing mass culture propagated by the socio-economic and political interests of modern capitalism.2 ‘[T]he regression of enlightenment to ideology’, we read in the early pages, ‘finds its typical expression in cinema and radio’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1979, p.xvi), fuelled by a model of heavily delimited ‘individuality’ characteristic of the culture industry’s ‘administered life’ (ibid., p.3). This seemingly blanket critique of film and mass media, given detailed form in Dialectic of Enlightenment’s most discussed and debated chapter ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, has for a long time been widely dismissed as ‘elitist’. Yet a historically informed account should stress that Horkheimer and Adorno were writing when Hollywood and European fascism’s domination of the moving image was crucial to address and a more radical vision of cinema seemed least tenable. Today a culture industry-themed analysis of cinema would provoke us to look afresh at the role it plays in sustaining regressive elements of contemporary life. However most fruitful for film-philosophy scholarship, I contest, is an engagement 65

66


with the culmination of Adorno’s writing on philosophy and art in his final decade’s work. This chapter seeks to highlight a mutually productive connection between Adorno’s 1960s writing and a strain of contemporaneous and subsequent European feature films analysed ahead as forming a ‘cinema of negativity’. Through the perspective Adorno provides, we can see that the most ‘depressing’ films – including many of the works discussed here – as designated by a desperately auto-affirming culture in fact show healthy signs of critical life, and it is the ‘positive’ ones that seem to say all is well which are beyond despair.3 At the outset, philosopher and the cinema I discuss share a crucial, founding point of convergence: an emphasis on reflexivity. Through complex, inextricably linked aesthetic strategies and thematic suggestion, these feature films self-consciously emphasise and investigate, frequently at the same time, the illusory and material nature of both the film image and the human subject by way of combining and utlising scraps of the contemporary culture – its imagistic and linguistic tropes and clichés – in which the work lives. Adorno agues in Aesthetic Theory – his towering final book posthumously edited and published in 1970 – that any viable modern art must appropriate techniques and materials from a culture industry-dominated reality, drawing attention to the marks or fractures resulting from the appropriation process and those elements that resist integration (1983, p.10). Reflexivity is here not just an issue of textual or formal analysis, or interpretations of particular artworks. The modern, reflexive work brings about what Adorno calls a ‘tremor’, generated both by its fragmentary form and critical engagement with horrific social reality (ibid., p.346). Modern art in this understanding is always alive as a ‘meta’ event or experience: both inherently reflexive, pointing to itself, and invoking/affecting space beyond its material-textual form – a process at the vertiginous centre of which lies negativity.

Stressing the negative In lectures leading up to the 1966 publication of Adorno’s philosophical magnum opus Negative Dialectics, he explains his work’s founding principle as the refusal ‘to accept a preordained idea, no matter how profound it claims to be’, including ‘one’s own membership of a group as the guarantee of truth’ – discourses he argues ‘bear the marks of totalitarianism’ irrespective of stated intentions (2008, p.107). Seeking to describe the conservative impact of Western philosophers (partially

Broken Glass by the Road: Adorno and a Cinema of Negativity

67

exempting the maverick radical German thinker Friedrich Nietzsche), Adorno highlights a common obsession with synthesis: ‘[T]hey all have a parti pris for unity. It is in that fact that we discover philosophy’s uncritical complicity with civilization’ (ibid., p.159). In light of this, Adorno proclaims a ‘protest against myth’ (ibid., p.181) in the form of a philosophy that aims to fully face up to modern reality – notably the Nazi death camps and World War II itself but also consumer capitalism and Stalinism, all demonstrating reason’s ‘instrumental’ aiding of atrocity and modern re-enslavement – by allowing no political or idealist excuses for suffering. Adorno’s long-time posthumous editor Rolf Tiedemann summarises this position: ‘[A]fter Auschwitz it is possible to philosophize only as negative dialectics; Adorno’s philosophy might well be described as an anti-theodicy’ (2008, p.242, n4). Describing his own process as ’open-ended, not predetermined by any framework’ (Adorno, 2008, p.181), Adorno alters Karl Marx’s materialist understanding of the dialectical thesis/antithesis/synthesis triad associated with German Enlightenment thinker G. W. Hegel, by replacing synthesis (traditionally enabling the affirming of identity of subject and object) with a new stress on the antithetical pole.4 This radically enlarged antithesis in Adorno’s philosophy becomes a ‘negative dialectic’ of endless critique. Without synthesis the new dialectic is necessarily unresolved and unable to claim identity so that the subject cannot now harness negativity in the name of self-empowerment. Instead, any subject-defining directive whereby nature, the other, or the object must be aggressively suppressed, is broken down by ontologically destructive and appropriation-resistant negativity. British philosopher Diana Coole argues in Negativity and Politics that for Adorno negativity is not a ‘metaphysical truth regarding things in themselves’ but ‘a purely immanent movement’ (2000, p.186), fully material in its power and affect.5 Here Adorno is faced with a resonant dilemma familiar to modern art in his analysis: how to critically render a culture’s failures without laying claim to any escapist, alternative, idealist or ‘outsider’ position? Adorno uses western culture and philosophy’s language of reason to reflexively attack its instrumental or enabling role in allowing ethical debasement through the diminution of its critical function, a move his former student and later Frankfurt School protagonist Jürgen Habermas considered contradictory (1988, p.119). A key strain of European cinema since World War II that I address ahead faces a not dissimilar quandary in seeking a modern means to render and deliberate upon the failures of the immediate modernity, offering extensive presentations of and engagements with the inadequacies, failures,

68


domination, repression, suffering and anguish of a technologised culture that enables such films’ existence. The cinema I consider here is commercial in its distribution yet less so in the films’ ‘content’ than more popular movies, in various often indirect ways critically rendering the culture that produces and consumes them. Rather than a critically-blunted ‘compromise’, as more avant garde or politically activist forms and modes of distribution might imply of it, such cinema soberly faces the fundamental facts faced by modern art from within its economic and political real. Importantly, the films seldom directly ‘attack’ the reality portrayed on screen. This would be to presuppose not only that one can speak and indeed exist outside of such a reality but also without such modernity’s means – romantic, idealist thinking indeed. Rather, Adorno suggests that any potentially radical art must acknowledge its reliance on the forms and cultural space it seeks to subvert: [D]irect protest is reactionary. Even critical art has to surrender itself to that which it opposes. ... The modernity of art lies in its mimetic relation to a petrified and alienated reality. This, and not the denial of that mute reality, is what makes art speak. (1983, p.31) The most radical work by filmmakers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Michael Haneke, or even Jean-Luc Godard, is usually quite oblique in its political critique or enclosed in quotations, and the director of such a philosophically and aesthetically radical feature film as Persona (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1966) has commonly been criticized for lack of political engagement. If Adorno’s use of reason is a reflexive cannibalistic process, such filmmakers test the very filmic-artistic and philosophical stuff of their own culture’s potential and worth and that of its modern forms such as film, without claiming a position beyond such a culture’s socio-economic reality, rather generating the potential for its critical reframing. An omnipresent negativity erupts at violent nodal points in such films. Some key examples are the shocking, entirely unpredictable split-second violence of Majid’s (Maurice Bénichou) suicide mid-way through Hidden (Haneke, France, 2005); the remarkable explicit slaughterhouse set-piece near the start of In a Year with 13 Moons (Fassbinder, West Germany, 1978) featuring long tracking shots of mass-industrial murder over which we hear a mix of Handel and autobiographical details of the story behind the tragic protagonist’s botched sex-change operation interspersed with quotes from Goethe, all recited hysterically


69

non-sync by Elvira/Erwin (Volker Spengler) in shouting-Hitler mode; or perhaps above all, the celluloid appearing to burn up and spin out of control at the epicentre of Persona when Alma (Bibi Andersson) looks at the camera after arranging for her silent beach-house companion, the famous actor Elisabet (Liv Ullmann), to tread on a shard of glass. Once the affective shock of such interruptions subsides, challenging intraand meta-textual questions of form and content emerge. Adorno writes in his 1960 book Mahler of an explosion in the first movement coda of the 6th Symphony that threatens to come across as questionable art due to its bluntness. ‘[T]he brutally intrusive passage is heard directly as an interruption of the horrible’, he writes. ‘To conventional thinking this seems literary and unmusical; no music ought to be able to say no to itself. ... Negativity for [Mahler] has become a purely compositional category’ (1992, p.125). At such moments, the partially submerged wellspring of negativity driving the work and its inherent modernity seems to assault on- and off-screen subjects and our vision of the ‘text’ itself. Describing Persona’s reflexive violence – the burn-up sequence, but also the film’s remarkable avant-gardist prologue, and countless other moments – critic Jean Narboni writes of ‘the sufferings of a narrative that is about its own logic, a film that devours itself’ (1987, p.301). The negativity also leaks into the film’s immediate contextual modernity and the human subjects peopling it. Stressing the negative does not for Adorno mean the values of a traditional binary system or Hegelian triad simply become inverted. Otherwise critical, dialectical thought is again neutered. Adorno calls ‘shallow’ any thinking that ‘treats denial and negativity as something positive that gives it meaning.’ Otherwise conservative and debased reality is thereby reinforced through the belief that failure, death and oppression are the inevitable essence of things – whereas ... connected as they are to the essence of things, they are avoidable and criticizable, or at any rate the precise opposite of what thinking should actually identify with. (2008, p.104) Engaging negativity’s critical function while delineating its regressive, quietist or miserabalist justifications (irrespective of proffered intentions) for suffering and the way things are – this is the central challenge Adorno throws out to any thinking and art’s claims to being modern. But art’s rendering and engagement of radical, critical negativity can only be forged using the source materials where they are found: in the real world as it is, rather than as we might like it to be.

70


‘The mirror has been shattered. But what do the splinters reflect?’6 Defining critical modern art’s formal and conceptual characteristics in Aesthetic Theory, Adorno returns to a musical term – ‘dissonance’, which has a certain ‘truth’ function. He writes: Dissonance is the truth about harmony. Harmony is unattainable, given the strict criteria of what harmony is supposed to be. These criteria are met only when the aspect of unattainability is incorporated into the essence of art. (1983, p.161) If dissonance was the repressed truth which, like a musical ‘subconscious’, was partially liberated early in the twentieth century (Adorno taking his cue here from Austrian composer and musicologist Arnold Schoenberg), the truth about tonality – that it is a lie – is the only possible ‘truth’ of modern art, which thereby comes to attack art’s own origin myths. ‘Art’s appearance of being the utterance of creation is shattered by the recognition of its own reified elements’, Adorno writes in Mahler (1992, p.123). The central means and appearance of this dissonance is fragmentation. Like the earlier stress on antithesis (and negativity itself) here we can end up with a rather paradoxical point where the only ‘truth’ is lack of authenticity – which can only be rendered through fragments. ‘The light that is kindled in the phenomena as they fragment, disintegrate and fly apart is the only source of hope’, Adorno writes evocatively (quoted by Tiedemann, 2008, p.248). The ‘state of utter negativity of utopia’, Tiedemann extrapolates, the ‘“damaged life” resulting from the failure of the Enlightenment, is the substantial meaning registered by the idea of the fragmentary’ (ibid.). Delineating fragmentation as the key to genuinely hopeful art in his major musicological work Philosophy of New Music from 1949, Adorno says that while the ‘closed artwork is bourgeois, [and] the mechanical artwork belongs to fascism’, only fragmentation ‘in its complete negativity’ holds any hope (2006 p.183). ‘It is in their stance as knowing that artworks become critical and fragmentary. Schoenberg, Picasso, James Joyce and Kafka, as well as Marcel Proust, are in agreement about what in artwork today has any chance of surviving’ (ibid.). It is not simply that the more a work or film apparently disrupts realist conventions the more it subverts ontological investments and ideology. The kind of progressive fragmentation Adorno describes works as part of a precarious dialectic of order and entropy, utilising and critically commenting on the former while


71

threatening it with the latter. This ‘in-between’ status is not only important for the reasons Adorno wrote of Mahler’s work; it is indicative of contemporary late modern life, therefore also cinema. With films such as Persona, Two or Three Things I Know About Her (Godard, France, 1966), 13 Moons, The Seventh Continent (Haneke, Austria, 1989), 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (Haneke, Austria, 1994), Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, France, 1961) and L’eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, 1962), formal fragmentation plays a central reflexive part in the generation and rendering of negativity. But for all their aesthetic and conceptual challenges, such works maintain recognisable marks of familiar form such as narrative and character – even if often through highlighted fragmentation, lacunae and regularly highlighted absence. In Mahler Adorno suggests lingering anachronistic forms in fragmented presentation effectively enable ‘alienation effects’,7 and short-circuit dissonance as an automatic conduit to progressive idealism: Perhaps alienation effects are only possible on somewhat familiar ground; if this is entirely relinquished, they too dissolve. ... Through its troubled contrast to the innocent means it uses, that experience is more compelling than if the complaining dissonance was set completely free and so became the norm. (1992, pp.20,21) Two or Three Things I Know About Her renders more reflexively than most films the consumer forms it uses in fragments – magazine covers, advertisements, neon signs, fashion items, and the cinematic image itself. And it constantly illustrates the usually invisible techniques of achieving or manufacturing unity, order and clear meaning within filmmaking.8 Godard’s whispered voice-over commentary frequently calls attention to the fact that the director is filming only certain things through the precise angles we see, keeping only particular footage, dismissing ideas and material not in order with a cohesive vision. But rather than extolling the power of the author as super-subject, this figure’s confidence is put into doubt through such questions. ‘Where is the truth’, he asks, which shot or moment? In this way, the usually synthesising singularity of the subject/author’s ‘vision’ is unmade in the most self-conscious address imaginable, the filmmaker’s special ability to talk directly to us on the soundtrack only accelerating the downfall. Throughout, the ‘complaining dissonance’ is kept intimately connected to both its source and victim: the real world, including human subjects, and that of images. Since its release, Persona in particular has been seen as operating at the furthest avant garde, hermetic end of theatrically released

72


cinema: a lacerating film in which ‘tonal’ cinema, art and identity seem only recognisable in fragments. Critic Jim Hillier describes it as rendering a ‘crisis of traditional forms’ (1987, p.231). But while not as obviously as with Godard’s film, reality is here both inescapable and primary source of the negativity so that we cannot just speak of ‘pure’ dissonance or disorder, rather a fragile balance. In a book featuring extended application of Adorno to Bergman’s reflexive cinema, Paisley Livingston points out that Persona captures ‘both continuity and discontinuity, bringing them together... [I]t is only in this paradoxical relation that the truth of the film can be discovered’ (1982, p.192). This precarious balance whereby the film dialectically renders both traditional order and progressive fragmentation works to exemplify Adorno’s dictum that modern art ‘continues to live up to the postulate of meaning even though it rigorously negates it’ (1983, p.221). In this way, the film not only forces the viewer to experience the impact of discontinuity and dissonance but also tantalising trace elements of familiarity, continuity and possible meaning – all offered through refractory shards. Adorno writes that although Mahler was persistent in his use of tonality, ‘the composition turns its thoughts to the opposite, a meaning that arises from fragments. ... [H]e picks up the broken glass by the roadside and holds it up to the sun so that all the colours are refracted’ (1992, pp.101,36). Familiar aesthetic language, invoking similarly traditional metaphysics, remains but in distorted form: made to ‘suffer’ under its flaws, fragmenting through being out-of-step with violent contemporary life. Adorno says of Mahler’s reflexive tonal form: ‘Overstretched, its voice cracks’ (ibid., p.20). This use of familiar aesthetics rather than ‘pure’ progressive-idealist rejection or revolutionary overthrow enables reflexive critique precisely because the disconnect between the modern world and its unbelief on the one hand and the lingering world of metaphysical idealism and ontological investment on the other as petrified in aesthetic forms is revealed in their cracked, broken rendering. This textual and aesthetic violence enables the artwork to chart its dysfunctional baggage both when it comes to artistic form and the human subject it often affirms. This twilight-of-an-era Janus glance, confronting the assumptions and language of the past with leaps into the future, privileging or idealising neither, is a hallmark of films like Persona, L’eclisse, 13 Moons, and more recently Hidden. The central human subject in each film exhibits different symptoms of fragmentation or ‘impossibility’ as a direct product of their immediate modernity and the particular artwork itself. In utilising familiar forms, no matter how self-consciously presented, the films are


73

unable to navigate clear escape from the ideological residue of the culture they essay, come from and enter into. This central use of material germane to the culture industry itself, no matter how fragmentary the presentation, means these works always risk perpetuating the status quo as affected and fashionable, ‘advanced’ symptoms. Emanating from the only reality there is, the prevailing ideology within contemporary life is impossible to fully transcend for the film that portrays its present-day modern real.

A touch with the void ‘Given the abnormities of real life today,’ Adorno writes, ‘the affirmative essence of art ... has become insufferable. True art challenges its own essence’ (1983, p.2). Adorno’s view of art that responds to the lies of mystification and idealist rationalisation of suffering (that we need to accept suffering so as to allow future redemption, be it religious, political, moralist, humanist) is summed up in a characteristic phrase: ‘Modern art is the antithesis of [the] jargon of authenticity’ (ibid., p.32). But the seduction of modern art as extolling an antithetical role of ‘pure’ negation as a new positive must always be resisted. ‘[I]t would be wrong,’ Adorno cautions, ‘to try and dispose of art through abstract negation... Neither the concept of solace, nor its opposite, refusal, captures the meaning of art’ (ibid., p.2). Rather, radical negativity for Adorno involves a resolute rejection of the presumed ontological ‘what is’ – through the aesthetic experience. Discussing how negativity comes into play through experiencing the artwork, Coole argues this occurs through art’s special conduit of virtuality, which allows ‘us to experience life while protected by the veil of aesthetic illusion’ (2000, p.93). Partially safe in our knowledge of the constructed nature of the reality with which we are interacting – a relationship made explicit in the reflexive cinema I address – and where normal laws of perception and reason do not apply, a film can thereby potentially offer a touch with the void. This is a silent caress with negativity that, while perhaps chillingly affective, we can ‘bear’ upon returning to phenomenal reality. Describing prominent characteristics of modern art, film theorist Gregg Lambert writes of a ‘mute and formless region that appears at the centre ... and becomes the principle cause of its “deformation” and even appears as its defect, its symptom, or its neurosis’ (2000, p.264). Initial audience responses to Persona, L’eclisse, 13 Moons and The Seventh Continent, but also diverse films such as Last Year at Marienbad, The Meetings of Anna (Chantal Akerman, Belgium, 1978)

74


or Sweet Movie (Dušan Makavejev, France/Netherlands/Canada, 1974) have often been that such works are ‘defective’, plagued by neurosis, difficulty, and absurd opacity. Irrespective of critical reputations, at least on initial encounter a real experiential ‘fact’ is that the films primarily seem to convey absence, loss, antithesis, defectiveness, failure and annihilation in abundance – never letting us forget or bracket negativity’s violent charge, the awful price it extracts, even if the values or beliefs that appear to be undermined on screen are deserving of critique. But the total conceptual impact of these films is not one of hopelessness and terminus. This would make them regressive, complacent and ultimately compliant in the face of reality. Persona’s interpersonal violence results both from Elisabet’s silence (sent to recuperate with her psychiatric nurse Alma after becoming mute one night on stage, the actor speaks only one word voluntarily in the film – ‘nothing’) and the often startling reflexive incursions of the film itself, starting with the avant-gardeist prologue. The inextricably bound nature of these human and filmic-material layers is most affectively sealed both with the apparent burn-up sequence explosively erupting halfway through Persona (including the subsequent return of fragments familiar from the prologue, then figuration-destroying slowmotion and out-of-focus vision of the film’s diegetic space), and later by way of the repeated monologue culminating in the famous image of Elisabet/Alma’s giant hybrid face. This disturbing auto-destructive icon starkly crystallises the women’s identity mutation and exchange of negativity in a genuinely dissonant image wrought through hyper-explicit bluntness (and emphasised by a massive dissonant chord’s long ‘warping’ sustain on the soundtrack) that recalls Adorno’s evocation of the shocking ‘artlessness’ when negativity makes its aesthetic presence most felt, as apparently destroying the artwork itself. But all this does not dictate annihilation, rather a constant opening up and challenge to interpretation enabled by formal and subjective markers of ‘neurosis’. In Two or Three Things, blanket terminus does not result from the filmmaker’s faltering narration as an in-crisis author wracked with self-doubt. Nor do we have to see humanity’s apocalyptic end in the cardboard-cut-out or robot-like subjects on screen throughout the film, defined entirely by their subservient role in capitalist production and consumption. As the only believable ‘human being’ we hear, that Godard himself cannot nevertheless enter his film’s visual field strikingly reminds us of cinema’s flattening, ontologically destructive power. But the effect is one of critique leading to openness and possibility, even chanced whimsy and lyricism, as well as crisis and loss. 13 Moons provides a deeper affective


75

emotional register and remarkably convincing subjectivity on screen – but via a limit-point, apocalyptically de-gendered protagonist who wears the tragic marks of history on his/her sleeve. However, the ideal of identity is no more secure in Fassbinder’s suicidal modernist melodrama than in Persona or Two or Three Things, with gender and sexuality providing neither markers of reliable self nor progressive ‘becoming’ even if desire for love remains. And despite the film’s hermetic tone, all this is played out within a definite and charged (if sketchily portrayed) context, a West Germany rich from economic recovery but ideologically prescribed as prime front in the Cold War and unreconciled with its past. The film’s tragic protagonist Elvira/Erwin appears still in love with Anton Saitz, a Jewish developer involved in corrupt and criminal activity who runs his business using rationalist principles familiar from a youth spent in Bergen-Belsen. When co-workers years earlier, Erwin had the neutering sex-change operation after the object of his affections had joked, ‘if you were a girl, that would be fine’. Both figures are in their different ways true black-hole ‘symptoms’ of history’s suppressed, violently neurotic and truly nihilistic reality. L’eclisse is ‘defective’ in a much quieter yet insidioulsy radical way, its story constantly derailed by remarkable temps mort – ‘dead time’, where there appears no narrative action or ‘purpose’ to the shot/scene/film continuing – and attention to remarkable graphic composition. Though insidiously always in operation, this effect has its nodal points such as when the film lingers almost documentary-like for many long minutes at Rome’s stock exchange and we ‘forget’ the halting fiction of its protagonist Vittoria (Monica Vitti), so that when she eventually enters the crowded space it is something of a surprise. The film’s most famous refusal is its still astonishing ending brought about by the permanent return of a now more abstract version of the stock exchange sequence’s non-narrative gaze. Camera and viewer turn up to meet Vittoria and her new boyfriend Piero (Alain Delon) – both hardly developed as characters in the first place (let alone a very convincing romantic couple) – for a dusk rendezvous at their familiar meeting place, an eerily quiet halfdeveloped street corner. We wait in the vicinity for seven minutes, but they never arrive and the film ends. While the final image of a street lamp filling the image with white suggests annihilation (a glimpsed newspaper headline warns of atomic disaster, and the film was released at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis), the whole sequence is very mysterious and genuinely abstract in allowing us to gaze upon the forms and textures of familiar exterior mise-en-scène that now becomes foreground for a fresh, now forcibly ‘post-human’ gaze. But this openness

76


and opportunity is only enabled through the film’s negations of anthropocentric narrative, action and characters – per se, the epistemological, spatial and temporal traditions of narrative cinema.9 A much more overtly non-human emphasis is palpable from the start of The Seventh Continent, which for many minutes just shows limbs tending to material objects as a bland middle class suburban family prepares for the working and school day. The film seems more clearly to enforce hopeless annihilation in the camera’s portrayal of automaton-like modern life for these humans and their last-act suicidal turn. But if such a bleak and deeply anonymous-looking late modernity can also produce such a clinically rendered yet deeply ‘engaged’, almost diagnostic-style film as this, then the critical negativity called for by Adorno is not lost. Such a cinema lacerates feature film form and the beliefs driving on- and off-screen life. Yet if not to anachronistically invoke idealist or apocalyptic teleological movements, the films cannot project a singular finality of ‘zero’ – that which Brian Rotman suggests in his book Signifying Nothing (1987) would be surely dishonest and strictly impossible in a modern era itself driven and enabled by negation’s primary role in overcoming pre-modernity’s superstructures of belief. A properly modern cinema will not only apply critical negativity to beliefs such as those associated with or derived directly from religious, feudal and aristocratic cultures, but also modernity’s own regressive regimes such as the temporal dictates of production/consumption capitalism via Taylorism and Fordism, and – particularly in the post-war films I address – their post-industrial forms.10 In L’eclisse, the machinations of modern market capitalism and share-trading are literally impossible to understand for Vittoria, who genuinely asks Piero of the market: ‘but what is it?’ And this strange economically-defined ‘reality’ is treated by the film overall as a secular belief system and lingo equally irrational and mumbo jumbo-reliant as the religion long ago practised in the very same building that houses the modern temple on screen – Rome’s stock market, a space treated by the camera with fascinated detachment as if watching an ancient, foreign, or science-fiction ritual. In The Seventh Continent, more highly-technologised life – palpable both in the parents’ work sequences and the domestic rituals – comes across as hopelessly sterile and the cause of ultimately tragic despair and violence. In Two or Three Things, the repetitive regime of outer suburban marriage and workday lower-middle-class existence is actually listed by Juliette’s husband after she asks what they will do tomorrow. ‘Get up, go to work, come home, go to bed’, he says, to which she replies: ‘And the next day?’ His answer: ‘We do it all again.’ The charge of late modernity’s regimes and rituals – its supposed rational qualities more like selective rationalisations


77

enabling new and re-made mythology and ideology – often comes across as real absence. But the films’ being able to suggest this and to render such ideas as and through art, prompting us to engage with our modern world’s promises, failures and continuing lies, will only be received as ‘depressing’ to an ideologically closed culture that no longer recognises critique as a healthy sign of life. Although such destruction and loss is confronting, the force of absence also potentially enables opportunity and genuine non-hierarchical difference and allowance for otherness – in other words, transformed futures. Modernity’s powering negativity can be harnessed to contrasting ends or understandings. But more hopeful possibilities are only conceivable if negativity’s often very intimate nihilistic power is fully felt, admitted, allowed into play. Cinema’s own materiality is a crucial ‘ground’ for such an event and engagement.

Material cinema and subject, a violent reality In Adorno’s short 1966 essay ‘Transparencies on Film’, a qualified reevaluation of cinema’s progressive potential, he writes of the medium placing a ‘higher intrinsic significance on the object, as foreign to subjectivity’ (1991, p.157). In Persona the apparatus of cinema and the film image itself are first given primacy as objective materials, with the prologue’s shots of film technology followed by images of symbolically loaded thematic shards (a disembowelled sheep, cadavers, a tarantula), reaching an astonishing apogee that seals a poetic essay on film’s intimately sensual and almost psychic affectivity when a thin boy reaches out from his bed and caresses the camera/viewer. A remarkable 180-degree cut then reveals a giant blurry face where the audience was, which we later discern is an oscillating image of two women who will subsequently play out an endlessly refractory drama of identity. Though the rest of the film is more narratively oriented than the prologue, the strange negativity returns to affect and further ‘infect’ an already unstable subjectivity performed on screen by two women. Persona’s treatment of cinema’s technological ‘essence’ and that of human beings is, however, not really different. The big close-ups of Ullmann’s and Andersson’s faces alone and in various combinations, starting with that big soft image traced by the boy, are both as magical and clinical as those of film‘s machinery: the ontological truths of the women or ‘subject’ on screen are unable to be revealed or penetrated as the camera buts up against hair, eyes, skin, and the contours of the human skull. And when that face is hybrid, distinctions between the film’s rigorously ‘what is cinema?’ and ‘what is the subject?’ reflexivities collapse into an inquiry impossible to ultimately

78


delineate. On the one hand, the human is clearly ‘assaulted’ here by technological materiality’s cold violence; on the other, any identity-forging subject/object distinction is broken down through film’s indiscriminate treatment of everything as equally vulnerable to the violence of images. Giving us more tangible cultural-historical material for its identityproblematising materiality to voice, Hidden features a very particular use of video as employed for the surveillance-style tapes inflicted on the central family and ‘reality’ itself (as well as ambiguous possible dream-images). From the very first shot, epistemological confusion is in play – are we watching a video or reality (or indeed dream)? It is via this destabilising, if aesthetically crystal-clear and unobtrusively framed aesthetic surface (although notably repeating proscenium-arch compositions) that we get sucked into the subtly seductive virtual world of Georges Laurent. Collaboratively fostering with the film a gaze characterised by a dialectic of complicity and immanent critique, here we partake of a gradually ambivalent account of Western culture by gleaning an intimate-yet-detached, historical-materialist portrait of ‘post’colonial Europe’s hidden marks.11 When it comes to questions of what it shows and how it shows it, Hidden exemplifies the cinema I discuss here in being concurrently subjective and objective, refusing to reconcile such oppositions yet also collapsing them. The medium itself remains materialist, but with enormous and unsettling implications. In matching the rest of the film’s compositions, every tape from the very first shot seems to have been produced without the camera being hidden at all, an uncanny and cautionary fact in a ‘post-September 11’ era when ‘security’ surveillance has perhaps become so ubiquitous as to be ‘invisible’ – the cultural authorship of which undermines the notion that the dangerous and ‘guilty’ party is the subject with no political, socio-economic, or visual-epistemological power in the Western metropolis. Although Georges remains the protagonist, the film thereby renders a crisis of identity, as marked by colonial history and culture, on a very abstract level performed through and by the uncanny ‘nature’ of the video form. Two or Three Things stages a different opposing and breakdown between filmic materiality and human subject. French philosopher Gilles Deleuze notes that Godard’s ‘critical objectivism’ in this film with its ‘sociological’ narration – whispered to us in a confessional, highly personalised way – problematises realism as always highly subjective, confusing the real and the imaginary (1989, p.12).12 The contradictions of the ‘subjectivity’ exhibited by Godard’s essaying gaze and voice-over in the film versus the emphasis on flattened social and material reality in its ‘documentary’ address is put into stark relief across the editing of


79

the famous central ‘coffee cup’ set-piece. After some minutes of documentary-like footage of a café over which Godard asks questions about how to film reality, the camera shows a close-shot of black coffee in a blue cup. The jarring cuts between increasingly close shots of the coffee, which comes to invoke outer space or primordial nothingness over which Godard intones the film’s most poetic existentialist-metaphysical reflections with his quiet voice the only sound, and very noisy shots of the barman working the espresso machine, inflicts an ontological violence derived from the everyday world of objects and cinema’s powerful rendering of it onto a willed and fragile – even spectral – subjectivity that the film demonstrates as ‘impossible’. Godard’s whispered meditations suggest a murky, romantic-idealist position for the author as supersubject. But his monologues become increasingly halting as the film goes on, making for a remarkably hesitant tone; and we are never sure how self-consciously ‘set up’ is their apparent failure to find visual ‘proof’ in the object-world on screen. The only convincing or recognisable human subject, Godard himself cannot enter his own film by submitting to the image-world. Like the anachronistic forms and their inherited regime of belief charted by Mahler’s work as fragmented or impossible, identity itself is marked in such cinema by illusion and irreconcilability. Adorno says of Mahler’s music, ‘human beings want to be redeemed and are not... [In his] world of images and sounds hope has grown very poor, its extraneousness to the work a vanishing trace in the depths of its caves’ (1992, pp.129, 163). Such rendering of moral-metaphysical desire and its earthly failure occurs in modern cinema through the one form where we are really vulnerable because so addicted: the definitively vertiginous medium of moving images, made of material ‘stuff’ yet generating such immense virtual power and suggestiveness. Never losing touch with the specific material by which the individual art-form and work commits its negativity, in Aesthetic Theory Adorno frames modern art’s paradoxical, in fact even impossible, task of giving voice to the contemporary world’s very real atrocity and suffering that – if fully faced – causes such impoverished hope seen in Mahler. He writes that such a reflexively marked ‘failure’ is the modest means of art’s ethically responsive continuation: If works of art are to survive in the context of extremity and darkness, which is social reality, and if they are to avoid being sold as mere comfort, they have to assimilate themselves to that reality. ... Much of contemporary art is irrelevant because it does not take note of this fact, continuing instead to take a childish delight in bright colours. (1983, p.58)

80


The cinema of negativity I have sketched here appropriates diverse materials from a culture industry-dominated real that usually seeks to paper over suffering with escapist colours, turning its bright tonalities dark. Through aesthetic forms often emphasising and utilising the non-linear impact of fragments combined, the films enable a destruction-enforcing openness through materially-forged conceptual violence – relatively subdued one moment and lacerating the next – that curls back and attacks any newly fostered essences, ideals or ideologies. The reflexivity powering such a process does not ‘destroy’ reality and affirm the veracity of images as the only truth. Rather, negativity circulates between images and the materiality they render and are – a product of the real world on- and off-screen that undermines such modernity from within. Not up to the task of representing the suffering and horror of reality, modern art is itself disabled by the negativity that also powers and draws it towards rendering atrocity. Far from presuming classical or romantic privilege, moral purpose, or socio-political efficacy, this art is not itself immune to the negation it lets loose, entropically marking the work’s own claims. We thereby ought not to ‘trust’ the given film, when it comes to the material but also human components giving it life: the veracity and motivations of authors and on-screen subjects, us off-screen, and the works’ reception within its broader social real as radical art, advanced culture-industry window dressing, or simply boring indulgence. Negativity’s forcing the eradication of such trust, its guarantee that there will be no guarantees – except that art will fail to live up to its ancient and modern promises of redemption and ethical elevation – is a high price to pay. And the films often leave us on notes gesturing towards such marked ‘failure’ through what Adorno suggests is the only possible response: the reflexive silence of glass already broken. With Bergman’s book-end shots of the projector lamp shutting on and off at either end of Persona’s short duration, we have the fact of film’s silent, material essence: cold technology both magically rendering and undermining the ‘dream of being’13 that cinema and philosophy’s schemas of identity often seem to describe. Two or Three Things concludes with its purported protagonist ‘Juliette’ (introduced as such by Godard’s off-screen narration early in the film, before being introduced again but as the actor Marina Vlady) narrating her own pre-sleep ritual as she performs it for us in the tiny bedroom of a high-rise compartment/apartment before a cut to black and an ‘impossible’ shot of the giant inside of a cigarette at the moment of inhalation. This incursion of cinema’s hyper-real ability to be half forensic recorder of material reality and half virtual sleight of fantastical


81

hand, like Bergman’s ‘magical’ shots of the inside of a movie projector, highlights the similarly uncanny nature of our invisible human companion here – the ‘author’, never to submit himself to the ontological violence of the image. After whimsically describing the ‘land of dreams’ to which Juliette/Marina or perhaps the narrator himself is now destined, Godard’s idiosyncratic whispering concludes with an elegiac yet hopeful line: ‘Since you lead me back to zero, it’s from there I must begin’, over a final image of grass covered by everyday cleaning products arranged like amateur installation art. The reflexive, far from reductive ‘zero’ with which these films commonly leave us is on the one hand devastating; but it is also a potential starting point the challenges of which are immense. In the final act of The Seventh Continent, a family’s destruction of their belongings brings no release from regimented bourgeois persistence before they commit suicide in front of the music video for 1980s power ballad ‘The power of love’ on TV. Neither apocalypse nor revolution can bring even cathartic pleasure in destruction, let alone a new dawn. Hidden offers a much more subdued, intimate and ultimately implicated study of crisis and breakdown opening out onto real first-world post-colonial reckoning, with the final images of Georges’ sedated cocooning under his duvet in the afternoon, bringing him – and us – no escape, conclusion, ‘answer’ or cathartic charge. An air of chilly, silent realisation fills such images. Adorno characterises this silence as paradoxical failure and achievement when it comes to art’s creeping irrelevance and impotence faced with reality: An age of silence has settled on art. It renders works of art obsolete. But while they do not speak any longer, their silence speaks all the more loudly. ... The language of the lifeless is the only form of comfort in a world where death has lost all meaning. (1983, pp. 400, 444) The films I have discussed demonstrate the silence and ontological obliteration that the truly modern art of cinema can potentially inflict upon – and locate within – a contemporary social real. The diverse melancholia and anguish that so marks such works on- and off-screen, even as it shows the disintegration of subjects that can rightfully experience and express such affectivity, suggests paradoxically that the aesthetic event of negativity can offer a means for both cinema’s and modernity’s critical continuation. This chapter’s analysis of Adorno’s philosophy of modern art and a strain of European feature-films has sought neither to affirm a replacement ontology nor enforce reactive obliteration, but rather

82


provoke mutual illumination by highlighting cinematic signs of negativity. The films’ final images of silence resonate: our fleeting last glimpse of Elisabet in Persona in bed reflected in the very technology of cinema in production, a camera lens as it quickly tracks in, before the projector lamp shuts off; the grass tableau of banal products concluding Two or Three Things, with on- and off-screen humans finally silent; the white-space abstraction of L’eclisse’s street lamp that concludes seven long minutes of creeping devastation gradually ushering in post-human possibility via liberated ‘ground’ and aesthetic texture; the inevitably tragic conclusion to In a Year with 13 Moons’ intimate and operatic negation of gender and sexuality set against a resurgent yet unreconciled post-Nazi Germany; or Majid’s silhouette in the penultimate shot of Hidden, presumably Georges’ dream but framed just like one of the surveillance videos, followed by the eerie-banal, historically ominous yet also subdued and possibly hopeful final image of teenagers coming out of a Parisian public school in the afternoon. In these last moments and throughout the films, modern cinema generates and thrusts heterogeneous planes of aesthetic splendor and critical potential onto an immediate modernity and audience, as enabled by the endless forging and engagement of radical negativity.

Notes 1. This is in stark contrast to the reputations of his friends and colleagues Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. For a comparative analysis of all three Frankfurt School-associated philosophers’ contributions to Film Studies, see Hamish Ford (2008). Adorno is now arguably seen as the key philosopher of the Frankfurt School for Social Research, the 20th Century’s primary ‘new Marxist’ grouping and scholarly institution, quintessential early exponents of what we now call critical theory. 2. They favour this phrase over today’s use of ‘popular culture’ so as to reject the idea of a modern ‘folk culture’ coming directly from ‘the people’ themselves. 3. The films addressed in this chapter are not the only ones potentially suitable for such an analysis. While I have limited my discussion to European cinema in part for its contextual – cultural and historical – proximity to Adorno’s philosophy, this is not to discount the possible usefulness for his work as applied to an analysis of select non-European films (one could imagine a productive study of Abel Ferrara’s work, or that of Tsai Ming-Liang, for example). Even so, the films addressed here have been carefully chosen as particularly appropriate and emblematic candidates. 4. According to Jon Stewart (1996) and some other Hegel scholars, such accounts of Hegel’s dialectical system are widespread mis-readings, particularly on the question of synthesis. Adorno’s emphasis on antithesis can also be accused of emboldening or ‘fetishising’ the antithetical perhaps to the point of being a kind of replacement system or even ontology that collapses


5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

83

both the idea of synthesis (read as unifying and totalising identity) and that of pure otherness as alterity in the process. Thanks to Greg Tuck for prompting these two qualifications. Adorno plays an important part in Coole’s historical consideration of philosophy’s treatment of negativity. She argues he is almost unique in neither selectively appropriating negativity in the name of subject affirmation nor disavowing it completely (2000, p.171). This inquiry is spoken by Max von Sydow as the painter Johan Borg in Hour of the Wolf (Bergman, Sweden, 1968), wearing smeared make-up as he performs for an audience of his ‘demons’ at the height of a very oneiric and interior subject-dissolution spiral, which Bergman generates through fragmentary form approaching that of Persona. The demand Adorno puts on modern art, and which it likewise throws out to reality, is effectively summarised in the next and final line we hear in the scene before a siren-like noise silences Borg (his lips continue to move) and the image loses focus: ‘Can you tell me that?’ Made famous by 20th-Century German Marxist Bertolt Brecht’s theatrical work and writing, these are reflexive markers within the work reminding the viewer they are engaging with a fictional text. They are supposed to encourage a critical, ideology-aware gaze upon ‘reality’ on- and off-stage/screen. In Jean-François Lyotard’s definition of the film director, he notes that ‘every filmic “signifier” (lens, framing, cuts, lighting, shooting etc.) [is] submitted to the same rule absorbing diversity into unity’ (1978, p.3). In many respects, Antonioni’s ‘60s films can be seen as exemplifying the post-war modernist feature film. His La Notte (Italy, 1961) even warranted a very rare filmic citing in Adorno’s 1966 essay ‘Transparencies on Film’, where we read: ‘Whatever is “uncinematic” in this film gives it the power to express, as if with hollow eyes, the emptiness of time’ (1991, p.156). As Kracauer’s famous 1927 analysis of the Tiller Girls’ performance shows, pre- and modern regimes can coalesce neatly – if in theoretical contradiction – in the interests of consumer culture, with reason reduced from its Enlightenment promise to an ideologically prescribed ‘ratio’ (1995). Later in the 1950s Adorno charted this diminution by analysing the ‘pseudorationality’ of astrology columns (1994). For an essay on the film along these lines, see Hamish Ford (2006). ‘[I]n place of the real object,’ writes Deleuze, Godard’s film made ‘visual description … go “inside” the person or object,’ so that ‘description tends towards a point of indiscernability of the real and the imaginary.’ (1989, p.12) The phrase is voiced early in Persona by an especially philosophical psychiatrist, in ‘diagnosing’ the flawed idealism possibly motivating Elisabet’s silence.

References Adorno, T. 2006. Philosophy of New Music. Translated by R. Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. —— 1994. The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture. Translated by S. Crook. London: Routledge. —— 1992. Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy. Translated by E. Jephcott. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

84


—— 2008. Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/66. Translated by R. Livingstone. R. Tiedemann, Ed. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press. —— 1990. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. London: Routledge. —— 1991. ‘Transparencies on Film’. Translated by T.Y. Levin in New German Critique nos 24–25, 1981–2, reprinted in J.M. Bernstein, Ed., The Culture Industry. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp.154–61. —— 1983. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by C. Leonhard, G. Adorno, and R. Tiedemann, Eds. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. —— and Horkheimer, M. 1979. The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming. London: Verso. Coole, D. 2000. Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics from Kant to Poststructuralism, London: Routledge. Deleuze, G. 1985. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ford, H., 2006. ‘Hidden: a Film for our Time’, RealTime, no. 75, October– November. —— 2008. ‘Difficult Relations: Film Studies and Continental European Philosophy’. In James Donald and Michael Renov, Eds. The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies. London: Sage Publications, pp.164–79. Habermas, J. 1988. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Translated by F.G. Lawrence. Cambridge: Polity. Hillier, J. Ed., 1987. Cahiers du Cinema: The 1960s. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Kracauer, S. 1927. ‘The Mass Ornament’. In T.Y. Levin Thomas. ed., and Translator., 1995. The Mass Ornament: Weimer Essays. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, pp.74–86. Lambert. G. 2000. ‘Cinema and the Outside’. In The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp.253–92. Livingston, P. 1982. Ingmar Bergman and the Rituals of Art, New York: Cornell University Press. Lyotard, J.F. 1978. ‘Acinema’. Translated by P. Livingston. Wide Angle, vol. 2, no. 3, pp.169–80. Narboni, J. 1987. ‘Towards Impertinence’. In J. Hillier, Ed., Cahiers du Cinema: The 1960s. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Rotman, B. 1993. Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero. Stanford University Press. Stewart, J. 1996. Hegel Myths and Legends. Chicago: Northwestern University Press. Tiedemann, R. 2008. Ed., Introduction and Notes. In Adorno, T. Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/66. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Filmography Caché/Hidden (Michael Haneke, France/Austria/Germany/Italy/USA, 2005). L’eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy/France, 1962). Hour of the Wolf (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1968).


85

In a Year with 13 Moons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1978). Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, France, 1961). La Notte (Antonioni, Italy/France, 1961). The Meetings of Anna (Chantal Akerman, France, Belgium/West Germany, 1978). Persona (Bergman, Sweden, 1966). The Seventh Continent (Haneke, Austria, 1989). 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (Haneke, Austria/Germany, 1994). Sweet Movie (Dušan Makavejev, France/Netherlands/Canada, 1974). Two or Three Things I Know About Her (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1966).

5 Film Can’t Philosophise (and Neither Can Philosophy): Introduction to a Non-Philosophy of Cinema John Mullarkey Giorgio Agamben and the films of Tony Scott; Emmanuel Levinas and the films of Michael Haneke; Jean-Luc Nancy and Claire Denis; Slavoj Žižek and Kieslowski; Gilles Deleuze and Godard (or Alain Badiou and Godard, Jacques Derrida and Godard, Jean-François Lyotard and Godard). Linkages come readily to mind for a philosophically-inclined viewer when looking at certain kinds of film. When Michael Haneke’s Caché (France, 2005), for example, finally reveals who is the blackmailer, who is filming the guilty, with the answer, ‘no one’, some cannot help but think of Levinas. His idea of a universal responsibility before the Other that comes with human existence as such, seems to chime with Caché’s refusal to apportion the usual roles of good and bad, yet without at the same time denying that a terrible wrong has occurred. To exist before another is to be guilty, to be responsible for that Other’s life. No one is guilty because every one is guilty. The point of view shots in Caché, therefore, operate differently from any subjective camerawork precisely because what we thought was the point of view of the blackmailer was never that. It was a moral imperative, the camera as accusatory – not towards the one it shoots, the Other, but to all of us who live and see. There is no blackmailer, there is no blackmail, there is only responsibility, and all of us are always already responsible before any degrees of innocence or blame can be apportioned. The camera in Caché becomes a moral argument. In fact, the same might be said for Haneke’s camera in general, his Code Unknown (France/Germany/Romania, 2005) also portraying this collective responsibility we have for others. The scene comes quickly to mind when Juliette Binoche’s character, Anne, is threatened by thugs on the Paris underground: throughout the ordeal, the camera refuses to turn aside, to let the viewer off the hook even for a momentary cut-away, 86

Film Can’t Philosophise (and Neither Can Philosophy)

87

implicating us visually as another fellow-passenger who does not come to her aid. Yet, we still have to ask: does this analogy with Levinas consequently make Haneke a philosopher in film and his films philosophical? Or should we first verify whether that ‘camera’ was actually Haneke’s in any case, rather than that of his cinematographers (Jürgen Jürges for Code Unknown, Christian Berger for Caché)? Or will extra-filmic details (interviews, reviews, and biographical information) establish the fact that Haneke has indeed been influenced by Levinas? And, even if he has not, what does it matter? Perhaps he has invented this philosophical idea independently (great moralists often think alike). But, if this last option were the case, how is Haneke’s idea philosophical, or philosophically interesting, then, if not on account of its similarity to Levinas’ (or some other philosopher’s) thought? Or, to invert things a little, could there be a patently philosophical idea coming from a film that has absolutely no analogue in any extant philosophy? As things now stand in the field, I suspect not. The whole compare-and-contrast industry between philosophy and film is a one-way street for a simple reason: there has yet to be an idea identified as philosophical in film whilst bearing no resemblance with any current written philosophy. We can put this point in anti-Levinasian terms: philosophy is not responsible for what it does to film, but only for its own perpetuation. The model for comparison is not just writing, however, but perceptibly philosophical writing – it has to belong to a certain genre, be it as a problem in philosophy or an idea of a philosopher. Which leads me to the question: why is film becoming increasingly important to philosophers? Is it only because it can be a helpful tool in teaching philosophy, in illustrating it? Or is it because film can also think for itself, because it can create its own philosophy? Strangely enough, a popular claim amongst film-philosophers is that film is no mere handmaiden to philosophy, that it does more than simply illustrate philosophical texts: rather, film itself can philosophise as film. Approaches that purport to be less textual and illustrative can be found in the subtractive ontology of Alain Badiou, the Wittgensteinian analyses of Stanley Cavell, and the materialist semiotics of Gilles Deleuze. In each case there is a claim that film can think in its own way. Too often, however, when philosophers claim to find indigenous philosophical value in film, it is only on account of refracting it through their own thought: film philosophises because it accords with a favoured model of extant philosophy. A recent case in point would be Daniel Frampton’s Filmosophy, which claims for film the faculty of a new kind of thought all its own: the

88


‘affective thinking of film’ (Frampton, 2006, p.12). Similar proposals have been made for Cavell’s Wittgensteinian approach, it being one that lets us appreciate how ‘films can philosophize’ (Goodenough, 2005, p.30). The argument of this essay (and my book Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image [Mullarkey, 2009]) however, is that, given the essentialist, all-encompassing nature of most philosophies of film, even those that seemingly allow film its own mind and thought cannot avoid reducing it to illustrations of extant philosophy. If film thinks, it is not in its own way but in philosophy’s way. Even Frampton – who is highly sensitive to the abuse of film by theory – begins with a definition of thinking in terms of ‘problems and ideas’ and what ‘creates pure concepts’ that is already reliant upon a pre-existing philosophical model, in this case, Gilles Deleuze’s. Similarly, it is Cavell’s use of Wittgenstein which is said to ‘clear the way’ for seeing film as philosophy because he forwards a therapeutic model of philosophising that can be likened to the experience of watching a film (Frampton, 2006, p.12; Goodenough, 2005, p 30). So far, so illustrative. What frequently claim to be ‘open’ readings of film as philosophy still remain pre-figured philosophical interpretations. Consequently, the aim of seeing film as philosophy is more often than not reduced to ‘film as text as philosophy’ in as much as the film’s audio-visual properties, no less than its cultural, technological and/or commercial dimensions, are interpreted from a ready-made philosophical vantage-point. In Deleuze’s own case, very particular films (Ladri di Biciclette, Italy, 1948, L’Année dernière à Marienbad, France, 1961) and film-makers (Vittorio de Sica, Alain Resnais) become examples of material forces playing a larger role in Deleuze’s overall metaphysical scheme. As such, they work to illustrate his philosophy (of film) simply because it focuses on one aspect of cinema rather than on any of the others. In fact, the distinction between exemplary and non-exemplary films becomes problematic at this point for any philosophy of film, for why should a philosopher making an ontological claim about film – that all (proper) films are (essentially) x – have favourites at all (that quite conveniently show this trait explicitly)? Wouldn’t it prove one’s case better to use less obvious examples? In other words, if one claims that film can think, then all films can think: one doesn’t prove the claim that all humans can do mathematics just by studying the minds of Fermat and Poincaré. Of course, one might propose that Richard Curtis’ Love Actually (UK, 2003), for instance – not a favourite amongst film-philosophers – is not a proper film, or at least not a true, real, or great example of cinematicthinking. But this clear case of the ‘No True Scotsman’ fallacy – employing


89

ad hoc redefinitions of key terms in order to protect an argument from refutation by counter-example – may leave one’s prescriptions seemingly unmotivated. Unless, of course, one’s reason for instancing Haneke’s Caché say, as a true, real, or great example of cinematic-thinking is because it accords with the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. There is always what one might call the ‘Transcendent Choice of Film’ at work in film-philosophy. By this I mean the selection of particular films to establish a theoretical paradigm of what film is and how it works. Such approaches make their selections of these particular films (or film elements – of plot over sound, or framing over genre, and so on) in the light of an outside: a theory of film that transcends the corpus of different films and film elements as a whole. The transcendent choice already forms the filmic materials so as to legitimate the theory ab initio, and therefore is circular. Such pre-emptiveness is double-edged, moreover. On the one hand, theory must be selective in how it makes film illustrate itself (and its theory of film), but, precisely on that account, it always leaves remainders – other films or filmic properties that it must marginalise in order to save its own integrity. Hence, Deleuze must disregard narrative and Slavoj Žižek must downplay the materiality of the image, for instance. The questions that arise, therefore, are as follows: must philosophy always render film (or particular films) as pre-texts for illustrating philosophy? What would it take to imagine how film might itself philosophise without reducing it to orthodox forms of philosophy? Must we change or at least extend our definition of philosophy and/or thinking in order to accommodate the specificities that come with the claim that film can philosophise without eliminating its sensory dimensions on account of their putative non-conceptuality (the sensible being always already a kind of conceptuality)? Finally, if there is a circularity evident when philosophers do extol the thinking of film, is it ever possible to avoid it? The answer is: not as long as we remain philosophers, according to the ‘non-philosopher’ François Laruelle. For him, there is an ‘idealism at the heart itself of thought’ such that philosophical representation inevitably colours its object with extrinsic conceptual schema. What philosophy calls ‘reality’ is first and foremost a concept of the world. Every philosophy is a ‘mixte’ of reality with a pre-decided interpretative schema, be it phenomenon and noumenon, fabula and syzhuet, or movement-image and time-image. A philosopher’s reality can never capture and exhaust what Laruelle calls the ‘Real’ itself (which I’ll outline further below), be it the Real of film or anything else.1 Like other philosophers of his generation (Deleuze, Badiou, Henry), Laruelle’s goal is the establishment of a radically immanent philosophy,

90


one which escapes transcendence. Yet he believes that this cannot be achieved in and through extant philosophy: it can only be instituted through a ‘non-philosophical’ thought. Echoing Derrida, Laruelle claims that transcendence is the very form of philosophy – the desire to capture reality through representation is endemic to it. But Laruelle’s break from this transcendence is not via the formalities of writing – philosophy as literature (early Derrida) – nor a restituted (negative) theology (late Derrida). Non-philosophy is an immanent thought that does not try to think ‘of’ the Real at all, but to think ‘alongside’ it: this makes it a performative practice, one rehearsing others’ philosophical ideas, but now under the sign of immanence (being a part of the Real) rather than transcendence (representing the Real). In that Laruelle is interested in the performance of philosophy, while also rendering it non-representational, he comes close to Henri Bergson’s idea of non-symbolic intuition. Bergsonian intuition too is mereological (a relation of part to whole); it is a thinking that is a part of ‘the Real’ rather than a point of view that represents it. On this view, intuition can achieve this only because both thinking qua intuition and the Real are themselves processes, and it is only processes that can partake, intertwine and part-icipate with each other in a non-representational manner. Like Bergson, therefore, Laruelle can be seen as a process philosopher interested in the ongoing mutations of philosophy while also performing those mutations in his own practice. And also like Bergson, Laruelle seems at once to be a critic of metaphysics (under its traditional mark of transcendence) and an anti-philosopher, while similarly instantiating an immanent thought that is radically democratic. This democracy must be taken seriously: its hypothesis is that anything can be taken as a thought. Hence, the goal of a non-philosophy of film: to extend this democracy of thought such that cinema too can be seen to think, only not according to how different extant philosophies represent cinematic thought, so much as how they are each, equally, a part of it. In this respect, ours is a metaphilosophical thesis: it is not that film itself is being posited as non-representational (on account of a claim, say, that it operates on an ‘affective level’), for nothing at all is being said about what film is (its ontology). Rather, it is what is said about film by ‘Theory’ that is the raw-material out of which a non-philosophy of cinematic thought can be shaped. We can put this in more prosaic terms. In 1983 the screenwriter William Goldman famously wrote that the secret behind Hollywood’s commercial success could be reduced to one golden rule: ‘Nobody Knows Anything’. When it comes to the reasons why one film succeeds at the


91

box office and another fails, there is no secret knowledge at all (other than Hollywood’s own ignorance of why it works when it does).2 I want to argue that the same is true of the philosophy of film. When it comes to what film fundamentally is, Nobody Knows Anything, or rather Nobody Knows Everything. This might sound like simply another form of (nihilistic) relativism, but it is actually a claim for something positive, for its corollary is not that everybody knows nothing (an obviously self-defeating position), but that there is more to film than any one theory (one telling us what film is) can exhaust – in other words: everybody knows something. This not-knowing-everything is not only an epistemic stance but an aspect of the Real of film, the inexhaustible reserve that thwarts every attempt to say ‘what film is’. In fact, it is this inexhaustibility of film that is most significant, for it is the one absolute that resists relativism. Each theory is partially right: indeed each theory is also a part of and immanent to film, rather than an outside, static image representing film as a static whole (I return to this point below). Consequently, I do not propose to offer an essence to cinematic thinking, but an outline of the forms of resistance cinema offers to any essentialist definitions of it and its philosophical powers (be they overt or covert) by orthodox, textualist philosophy. This would be a cinematic non-philosophical thinking along the lines of Laruelle’s conception. The primary point I want to establish, therefore, is that there is no single form of proper thought (‘philosophical’ or otherwise), but many kinds of thinking, such as that shown by film when it resists a certain kind of ‘philosophy’. Whereas philosophy, according to Laruelle, is ‘intrinsically anti-democratic’ and judgmental, non-philosophy denies nothing and affirms all: it seeks a ‘democracy between philosophies, and between philosophy and the sciences, arts, ethics, etc....’ (Laruelle 1996, p.54). The ‘non-’ in Laruelle’s use of the term ‘non-philosophy’ is neither a dialectical negation, nor even something contrary to philosophy: it is an enlargement of the set of things that can count as thought, a set which includes extant philosophy, but also a host of what are often presently deemed (by philosophers) to be non-philosophies. Just as the non-Euclidian geometries do not negate Euclid’s geometry but incorporate it alongside other types of geometry, so Laruelle’s nonphilosophy integrates extant examples of philosophy with examples of what those same philosophies regard as their opposite. Against such an egalitarianism of thought, the principle of our postHeideggerian age has been to ask continually for true thought and real thinking. This is because, supposedly, the most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that ‘we are still not thinking’

92


(Heidegger, 1968, p.4). From the position articulated here, however, the opposite is the case. Thinking is everywhere. For some, this will be unacceptable. For some, the true philosophical horror is not that we are not (yet) thinking, but that we have always been thinking. Given the view that philosophy must have an essence and so an exclusivity, then what is (philosophically) unthinkable is that thinking might be found all about us. As F.H. Bradley quaintly put it in his Aphorisms: ‘it is not true that Mr. X never thinks. On the contrary, he is always thinking – about something else’ (Bradley, 1993, no.79). In other words, one can’t privilege any one form of thinking other than by sheer fiat – ‘I hereby name this activity “thinking”.’ Outside of such baptisms, however, there are always so many counter-examples: thinking descriptively, poetically, mathematically, affectively, embodiedly, analogically, syllogistically, fuzzily, paraconsistently; thinking through a method of questions, of problems, of dialogue, of dialectic, of genealogy, of historicism, of deconstruction, and so on. Taken on their own, though, each of these exemplary cases restricts the idea of thinking in a presumptive manner, either by positing what could count as thinking per se, or by positing what counts as ‘good’, ‘proper’ or ‘true’ thinking (hence, it is a structural necessity of non-philosophy that thought is exercised in an indefinite, non-hierarchical, number of ways). So, what if philosophy (and philosophical thinking) was, by definition, that subject which has no definition, or at least perpetually struggles with its own, multiple definitions? Certainly, philosophy has proven itself historically to be the subject in constant search of its content. Though many have tried and continue to try to give it an essence – in the a priori, or logical analysis, or concept creation, or intention, or fundamental questioning, or simply in being ‘Heideggerian’, ‘Husserlian’, ‘Hegelian’ – the sheer number and diversity of these attempts only recalls us to the fact that its identity has always been contested. At best, one might call philosophy a parasite or symbiant; that is, inherently relational rather than substantial. The philosophical is always in another subject, or emerges out of one, out of a so-called ‘non-philosophy’. It is in the moment when another subject, a nonphilosophy like politics, literature, or film, finds itself in a state of transformation, with an identity crisis. Or rather, it is when such matters find subjects whose relationship with them is mutually transformative. It is the relationship between those subjects (its audience, its practitioners) and the subject-matter that is philosophical. That, at least, is the optimal case whereby the philosophical status of film, say, concerns what we mean by philosophy as much as what we mean by film. But this, again, is only to say that philosophy is everywhere.


93

In his Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, Allan Kaprow writes of the process of ‘un-arting’ or the taking of ‘art out of art’, which he describes as that ‘act or thought whose identity as art must forever remain unknown’ (Kaprow, 2003, p.xxix). Art’s identity comes through not being self-identical. Non-philosophy attempts to make the same case for philosophy through film. To de-philosophise or un-philosophise, to embrace the insult of being ‘unphilosophical’ is warranted because the alternative of being recognised as ‘proper’ comes at the cost of also being a cliché. This is not to romanticise a reflex negation of all philosophy following Wittgenstein or Rorty, but perhaps the necessary change of orientation that is the only way to enact a new philosophy, a philosophical event that redraws the map of non-philosophy and philosophy.3 The methodological agnosticism practiced in Laruelle’s non-philosophy, therefore, is not about weaving exotic mysteries just for the sake of failing, for the sheer lack of it, but to create something new in the name of what could become ‘philosophy’. And what better way could there be of becoming philosophical than by seeing film as philosophical without that involving recognizable forms of (textual) philosophy – precisely in that moment when we fail to see film as orthodox ‘philosophy’ (when films can’t ‘philosophise’), in that moment when philosophy becomes something unrecognizable to itself? Admittedly, such a line of thought will meet with resistance. Robert Sinnerbrink, for example, likens this non-philosophy of film to the plot of a zombie-horror film, its central protagonist being the ‘monster of reason called “philosophy” [that] has been implacably devouring films for its own self-serving ends.’ (Sinnerbrink, 2009). Films are transformed by philosophy into ‘uncanny clones taken over by the inhuman forces of conceptualisation, generalization, and theory-confirmation’. But the story also has heroes (Bergson and Laruelle) who help us toward a ‘happy ending – a pluralistic, non-philosophy of film combining interdisciplinary openness with philosophical self-restraint’. But, as Sinnerbrink notes, the greatest difficulty facing the heroes of films in this genre is to avoid becoming a zombie too, and as such he is moved to ask whether this non-philosophy of film is not simply another overweening theoretical paradigm – the friend and alley who turns out to be the last, and deadliest, zombie of them all? Indeed, what Sinnerbrink counts as a reliance in this approach on ‘the plausibility of Bergson’s metaphysics or the cogency of Laruelle’s critical non-philosophy’ opens up a circularity of its own that thereby threatens to weaken the force of its critique of other film-philosophers.

94


As he says: ‘Can one both advocate an open pluralism of theoretical perspectives while also critically rejecting these as imposing arbitrary or dogmatic claims upon selected films?’ In response, what must be said is that at no time is a representationalist critique being offered here – this is not an attempt to improve upon other philosophies’ failed pictures of what film really is. Rather, the point of a non-philosophy of film is that it integrates as many views of film into the Real of film simply by surveying them together, in a montage (the material aspect of its work), while at the same time showing their physical limits: the fact that they are seen to share a space (that their theory is never as total as its hopes to be) shows that they cannot solely occupy the entirety of that space (‘what film really is’). But they are not dismissed thereby as false representations: rather, they, and their limits (irreducible remainders, aporias, circularities…) are made Real, or materialised as part of the Real of Film (in outline). This ‘outline’ can be seen as the materiality that every essentialist philosophy of film shares, the ‘shared background’ that allows us to sidestep the logics of either relativism or circularity. It does this simply by materialising those circularities – the logical aporias no longer being failed representations, but outlines of the Real’s resistance to such representation.4 Indeed, what Andrew McGettigan positively takes from the project of non-philosophy of film is its attempt to view the relative failure of each theory as also a partial success, when mixed together. Such montage must be understood simply at the level of the Kuleshov effect whereby subsequent images change the meaning of antecedent ones when cut together. Such emergent effects are differential, as is a comparative thought such as non-philosophy: that is, it builds its effect by mixing the partial representational failures of theories together as material forms. What some disparage as ‘associational thought’, therefore, can be given a new methodological purpose as ‘montage thinking’, for all thought is a mixte of some kind. Likewise, any ‘new’ aspect a theorist brings to a film belongs both to the theorist and, in part, to the film: the theory is only possible in virtue of, or rather just is, the mereological relation between the two. Yes, there is a circularity between the chosen example and theorist here as well, but, just like all other circularities (of Bordwell, Žižek, or Deleuze), it can be reviewed (or materially used) as part of the Real, as relational rather than representational (one fixed image picturing another fixed entity). Hence, the alternative ‘reliance’ on Bergson’s process philosophy within a non-philosophy of cinema. What Sinnerbrink constructs as an either/or (‘it is the philosophical critic’s virtuoso performance – rather


95

than any immanent development of thought inherent to the film’ that generates any new and interesting theory of cinematic thinking), is not a binary, because the two options are actually one relation. The film theorist Richard Rushton has also offered a critique of a non-philosophy of film. While being sympathetic to the approach in part, he too takes leave of it on the point of this pluralism (which he regards as the ‘fantasy of a wondrous, conflict-free, being-in-common of all philosophical thought’). Using Stanley Cavell’s counter-intuitive interpretation of a key scene from King Vidor’s Stella Dallas (US, 1937), he sets up a similar dichotomy to Sinnerbrink’s:5 And now I need to ask: did Cavell discover something in Stella Dallas that was indeed that film’s own thought, but which had remained hidden to others because they had, as yet, been unable to think it? … But does it even matter? … Even if he has imposed some kind of philosophy (pertaining to subjective independence) on this film, then is this really something we need to fundamentally question? Does it really mean that Cavell has not let the film be what it is (or can be)? But what could that possibly mean anyway, for surely any film — and any object for that matter — is only ever a product of the framework into which we have put it. (Rushton, 2010) What is in question here are actually two claims made by the nonphilosophy of film that must be distinguished. Firstly, film (and any theory of film) cannot be our product alone (hence, the realism and materialism of non-philosophy, which is certainly not some kind of framework relativism). Cavell neither passively discovered his reading of Stella Dallas in it, nor actively invented his reading out of it alone: it was a co-production. The reading was co-generated, and, adds, like every theory, to the ongoing Real of the film. But, secondly, inasmuch as that reading might be intended (by Cavell or others) to exhaust Stella Dallas (what it ‘really is’ about) then it is bound to failure simply by being incapable of displacing (logically, spatially) every other reading. Stella Dallas is underdetermined simply because, like every Real, it is inexhaustible. This indefinite reserve is not the inexhaustible number of perspectives (or frameworks – qua representations – of a fixed reality), but the fact that each new perspective is co-engendered with film, as a part of film (and the film as a part of the theorist understood relationally in a viewing event). The Real of Film, or a film, simply is this inexhaustibility, this moving form that only adds each new theory to itself because what its self is, is always moving (and each new ‘reading’ just is, immanently,

96


part of that process). This inexhaustibility does not obviate the fact that cinema, like every other process, requires genera (at base, simply the things which move, or, in film, the genres and techniques which evolve): but the process view had never argued that things don’t exist, but merely that they too are moving (albeit at a slower pace). And in film, genres and techniques also evolve.6 And here is the crucial point that must be kept in mind. For nonphilosophy, the Real is, in part, that which undoes any attempt to define the Real. This part of it is all we know: the resistance to every representation (which is where it differs from the Lacanian Real, which is open, even if only indirectly, to psychoanalytic representation). Knowing is a part of a material process, not a representation. So, where Rushton argues that ‘what ultimately matters, therefore, is that this theory or philosophy has done something to the film, has transformed the film’, (Rushton, 2010) I would simply add that this transformation can be neither ex nihilo (it came from film too – it is about Stella Dallas after all, and this ‘aboutness’ has a materiality to it that cannot be discounted) nor the last transformation (there will be sequels). But where Rushton continues by saying (perhaps provocatively) that ‘we risk making films what they are, by saying things about them, making judgments of them, and imposing our philosophies upon them. That is how films and cinema become what they are: we make them’, I would have to differ (Rushton, 2010). Film and viewer make each other through a coordination of speeds that generates a thought that is truly cinematic only when it is ‘truly philosophical’, that is, by disrupting all previous categories as to what might count as philosophical thought. Film theorist Joseph Mai also raises concerns with the apparent relativism of this non-philosophy, only now through its attempt to de-essentialise philosophical definitions of proper (‘philosophical’) thought (Mai, 2009). For Mai, ‘it is not clear that “undoing thought” is thinking in more than a metaphorical way’. Moreover, the affectivity involved in this undoing seems to move us ‘away from thinking toward feeling and emotion, as if the film event does not have a mind at all, but a heart’. Such a displacement, says Mai, ‘actually leaves the term film “mind”…somewhat bloated and overly impressionistic’ (ibid). In defence of my position, though, there is no intended opposition between affect and thought or mind: indeed the non-philosophy of film takes one of its cues (as Mai acknowledges) from Bergson’s concept of ‘creative emotion’, which is an affect that overcomes the duality of rationalism and emotivism – ‘an emotion capable of crystallising into representations’ (as Bergson puts it, 1977, p.47). Far from being a


97

discrete, unreflective feeling, it is precisely the affective thinking in time that undoes essentialist definitions of thought and philosophy. However, Mai’s impression that there is a duality operative within this position possibly stems from an overuse of the term ‘thinking’ when running through the cacophony of claimants for the title of true philosophical method. Why use the term at all? Aristotelian wonder, for example (an affective definition if ever there was one), sidesteps the intellectual prism through which other candidates, like questioning, doubting, or creating, all seem to pass. What is offered, then, as a ‘montage thinking’, need not be called a thinking at all: in as much as a non-philosophy of film tries to emulate cinema’s philosophising through its own method of montage (of theories), it should be called montage simpliciter – there is no need to append ‘thinking’ to it to make it philosophical, for philosophy itself can be seen as a kind of montage (or mixte, as Laruelle puts it). This montage is not one more essence of philosophy, however, but the recipe for a pluralism of philosophies. Andrew McGettigan, however, has a very clear idea of what philosophy should look like (it is one specific form of thinking), and is therefore unsure, as he states in his assessment of a non-philosophy of film, ‘how Mullarkey’s “meta-theory” is distinct from the rather less grand notion of the literature survey’ (McGettigan 2009, p.66). A lot depends, McGettigan adds, ‘on Mullarkey’s co-opting of François Laruelle to produce a ‘non-philosophy of film’. Indeed it does. The idea of survey is precisely the Laruellian democratisation of philosophy aimed at – one that reviews and reuses other theorises (whether they be conventionally termed ‘philosophical’ or not) as its raw material (they are not true or false representations of the Real, but parts of it). But McGettigan’s own disquiet with the approach entirely depends upon his own clear intolerance for such a democratisation of philosophy – for anything outside the Hegel-Adorno axis of thought is simply not relevant, either to film or to art in general.7 It is on this idea of an immanent equality between theories that I would like to finish by returning to Robert Sinnerbrink’s critique of non-philosophy. In particular, there is what he describes as the conflation within this position of ‘novelty with the New’. While popular films of little artistic merit can often provide novelty – especially at the sensational level – they should not be confused with the ‘power of film’ (be it popular or art-house) that enables us to think ‘the New’: The New…is what can often barely be recognized or made intelligible or sensible with reference to existing frameworks of representation

98


or interpretation. This ‘evental’ quality of the New is what I take Deleuze and other film-philosophers to be referring to when they cite modernist movements and auteurs…. How can we experience and think the New in and through film? And what does this mean for film-philosophy? For me, it is those filmmakers who continue to experiment with the possibility of thinking and experiencing the New in cinematically creative ways—even when this appears ‘difficult’ or unintelligible from the viewpoint of the familiar or already-known—who are the most philosophically and artistically meritorious. And here I confess to my own philosophical and aesthetic prejudices that could only be shed, I imagine, by eschewing any kind of situated or finite point of view. (Sinnerbrink, 2009) The crucial question, finally, then, concerns this ‘we’ who experiences and thinks ‘the New’. Sinnerbrink himself admits that both film and philosophy teach us that it is ‘impossible’ to shed our finite point of view. In as much as cinema, understood as a relational event with the viewer, is both put in process by the viewer (‘the’ film is a set of alterable speeds) and puts the viewer in process (by changing his or her set of alterable speeds), there is no fixed ‘we’ that can stand still long enough to re-present a novelty as if it were the New for any and every possible perspective. In other words, one cannot shed one’s situated point of view, one can only have it altered in relation to a cinematic event – and that event can be as thoughtful for one perspective watching commercial cinema as it is for another watching a modernist art-house masterpiece. The relationship of an audience to a film is mobile: hence, sometimes it will be open to the radical impact of any film (if only because of being rarely exposed to film, be it ‘officially’ avant-garde or not), but at other times the audience can be jaded with and inured to the effects of both commercial and avant-garde film (art-house cinema can be clichéd too). To be more precise, the impact of film is not located solely in the film, but in the film viewing event, which is inherently relational. What is heterogeneous to one spectator, may be formulaic for another. Any film can fulfill either role (in the right context for the right viewer), but most film viewings only fulfill the latter, routine role, if only by sheer dint of the fact that our attention is elsewhere. The new is in the shifting relation, not in the hypostatised viewer or film: we can never see or judge a film from nowhere, from God’s non-finite position, though we can always, and indefinitely, see more films, see them in different situations, with different bodies, and in more detail.


99

Notes 1. For a general introduction to Laruelle’s thought, see Mullarkey, 2006. 2. See Goldman, 1996. 3. See Mullarkey, 2006 for discussion of one such event in 1988, especially pp.1–11. 4. I borrow the use of this phrase ‘shared background’ from Greg Tuck’s editorial remarks. 5. Cavell’s reading proposes that Stella’s calamitous attempt to impress her daughters’ friends in high-society is an intentional failure. 6. My thanks to Greg Tuck for reminding me of this fact. 7. The irony here is striking: McGettigan writes as a philosopher on behalf of art (not just cinema): he announces that ‘those already engaging with the arts have no need of this book’ (Refractions of Reality), while also accusing the author of Refractions of Reality of being just another one of those philosophers ‘writing from philosophy departments’ (McGettigan, p.67), though, in fact, the author has a degree in film studies and has taught in a film studies department. But to no avail: without an understanding of the generic concepts of art arising out of ‘the richer strain drawing from German Idealism’, and without understanding ‘mediation’, Refractions of Reality cannot offer anything of value. However, it is not just this book but any work of film-philosophy that is at fault on this score, according to McGettigan. Film-philosophy cannot be said to be a proper ‘subdiscipline’ and so must be subsumed within what has been said about art in general by those in the German Idealist tradition. This resort to art in general is especially odd, however, in that McGettigan accuses Refractions of having occluded film with theory, even though Adorno can hardly be said to have done otherwise for his own part.

References Bergson, H., 1977. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, translated by R. A. Audra and C. Brereton, with the assistance of W. Horsfall Carter. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press. Bradley, F.H., 1993. The Presuppositions of Critical History and Aphorisms, with a new introduction by Guy Stock. Bristol: Thoemmes Press. Frampton, D., 2006. Filmosophy. London: Wallflower Press. Goldman, W., 1996. Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting, 2nd rev. edn. London: Abacus. Goodenough, J., 2005. ‘Introduction I: A Philosopher Goes to the Cinema’. In R. Read, and J. Goodenough, eds. Film as Philosophy: Essays on Cinema after Wittgenstein and Cavell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Heidegger, M., 1968. What is Called Thinking? Translated by J. Glenn Gray and F. Wieck, with an introduction by J. Glenn Gray. New York: Harper and Row. Kaprow, A., 2003. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, expanded edition. Berkeley: University of California Press. Laruelle, F., 1996. Principes de la Non-Philosophie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

100


Mai, J., 2009. ‘Review of John Mullarkey, Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image’. In Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, [online] 26 June 2009. Available at: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=16386. McGettigan, A., 2009. ‘Molls: Review of John Mullarkey, Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image’ in Radical Philosophy, no.158, November/ December, pp.66–7. Mullarkey, J., 2006. Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline. London: Continuum Press. Mullarkey, J., 2009. Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rushton, R., 2010. ‘Review of John Mullarkey, Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image’, Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image’, in The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 14, no. 3. Sinnerbrink, R., 2009. ‘Fabulations of Reality: John Mullarkey’s Non-Philosophy of Film’, paper delivered at the University of Dundee, 6 October 2009.

Filmography Caché (Michael Haneke, France, 2005). Code Unknown (Michael Haneke, France/Germany/Romania 2005). L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Alain Resnais, France, 1961). Ladri di Biciclette (Vittorio de Sica, Italy, 1948). Love Actually (Richard Curtis, UK, 2003). Stella Dallas (King Vidor, US, 1937).

Part II Wide Angles – The Boundaries of Film-Philosophy


6 The Loom of Fate: Graphic Origins and Digital Ontology in Wanted Stephen Mulhall

Wanted (Timur Bekmambetov, USA/Germany, 2008) tells the story of a sickly, sexually frustrated, variously exploited and generally selfloathing accounts manager named Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) who discovers that he is the son of a recently-killed member of a secret society of assassins known as ‘the Fraternity’. This group was founded a thousand years earlier by a quasi-monastic guild of weavers; its aim was to carry out clandestine executions to restore order to a world on the brink of chaos, and it has continued to do so until the present day. The surviving current members of the Fraternity – led by Sloan (Morgan Freeman), and based in ‘Textile Factory No. 17’, in which much straightforwardly commercial weaving continues to be done – invite Wesley to join them, primarily so that he might hunt down his father’s killer, who is apparently intent upon wiping out the Fraternity altogether. As with so many of the blockbuster action movies to which Hollywood is presently devoted, Wanted is inspired by a graphic novel of the same name (written by Mark Millar, with drawings by J.G. Jones and colours by Paul Mounts), and deeply dependent on computer-generated and –manipulated imagery. For the canonical subjects of what were previously known as comic-books were, of course, superheroes and their villainous counterparts – beings whose characteristically miraculous powers could be far more credibly depicted by graphic artists than by their cinematic rivals, constrained as the latter used to be by the limits of essentially photographic transcriptions of reality (together with such special effects as are achievable within those presentational conditions). But the advent of essentially digital modes of capturing, manipulating and displaying visual imagery has made it possible for movies to achieve a new kind of perceptual credibility in their treatments of such 103

104

Wide Angles – The Boundaries of Film-Philosophy

subject-matter, and so to further colonize this previously resistant range of source material in unprecedentedly powerful and convincing ways. One striking feature of Wanted’s relation to its graphic source, however, is that it does not, in general, use these digital resources in the way I just sketched. The original graphic novel is concerned with a fraternity of supervillains whose members wear the traditional range of bizarre costumes; their clandestine control of the world has lasted for barely twenty years, was founded on the bloody eradication of every existing superhero, and now involves making violent forays into a series of parallel universes; and the basic plot involves internecine strife between different supervillain factions. It thereby offers the kind of narrative content and visual spectacle that standardly attracts digital cinematic treatment – an exceptionally knowing riot of extreme violence and destruction, superpowers that defy the laws of physics, and more or less grotesque refashionings of the human frame. The movie does not entirely detach itself from the familiar transcription template: in particular, it primarily acknowledges its indebtedness to Millar and Jones by repeatedly showing in hyper-realistic, slow-motion detail what happens when a bullet passes through a human skull – a cloud-of-blood-droplets trope that is far more obsessively featured in the panels of the original graphic novel. However, its characters wear no costumes, raid no parallel universes, exhibit no physical monstrosities, exploit no futuristic technology, and restrict their material destructiveness to the odd car or pharmacy shelf (before the Fraternity itself implodes in internecine violence). All in all, the stylistic signature of the cinematic Fraternity is rather downbeat and self-effacing – quite as if declaring that its way of acknowledging its origins and so of exploiting its new digital resources must be found elsewhere. We can begin to locate this ‘elsewhere’ by noting that whereas supremely skilful assassination is only one of the special talents exemplified in the comic-book fraternity, and is no more subject to explanation than any other superpower on display, it is the sole occupation of every member of the cinematic Fraternity, and its acquisition and exercise are given an explicit and detailed (if not exactly plausible) accounting. According to the film, the Fraternity’s members are capable of superhuman feats of physical prowess because of their inheritance of a certain metabolic overdrive (something Wesley has hitherto interpreted as susceptibility to panic attacks): their abnormally fast perceptual and reactive abilities are experienced by them, and so by us, as slowing down time. This means that they can adapt themselves elegantly and gracefully to the most complex and restricted of circumstances in order

Graphic Origins and Digital Ontology in Wanted 105

to achieve their lethal goals, with no target (not even a fly’s wings) too small to see, and no window of opportunity (not even the opening door of a sports car spinning under extreme acceleration just in front of a speeding truck) too narrow to step through. The film’s signature realization of this at-homeness in the world – this unprecedented, hyperbolic marriage of embodied being and environment – is entirely absent from the graphic novel: its presentation of the Fraternity members’ ability to exploit the fractional delay between pulling the trigger of a gun and the bullet’s departure from the barrel by swinging the gun itself in an arc that imparts a curving trajectory to the bullet. In their hands, a gun becomes a kind of explosive slingshot – capable of hitting its target even when that target is obscured by intervening obstacles or located around corners, and consequently seeming (but only seeming) to render the laws of physics and geometry malleable. It is with respect to the visual realization of this particular capacity, and above all to its paradigmatic expression in gunplay, that the film most blatantly and intensively deploys its digital resources. Why so? The other object in the film that these bullets most closely resemble is the shuttle in the looms that fill the textile factory, and that constitute an exemplary challenge in Wesley’s training regime – when Fox (Angelina Jolie) instructs him to catch one in mid-flight as it drags its thread through the momentary gaps created as two opposed but aligned arrays of threads repeatedly pass through one another, no sooner drawn apart by the loom’s shafts than they are driven back together, not quickly enough to prevent the shuttle from completing its pass but just quickly enough for it to begin its return journey. That shuttle is not only shaped just like a bullet: it has an analogous capacity to trace out trajectories that appear to be linear (side to side) but are in fact curved (since each pass occurs on a higher line than its precursor), quite as if moulding physical law to its own ends. And the fineness of its margins for error also make it (as well as the bullets it resembles) a figure for the uncanny ease with which every Fraternity member can project himself through the smallest gap in the loom of his circumstances – the particular situational array of objects within which and by means of which he is to achieve his goal, to interweave necessity with contingency, and thereby to fulfil his destiny as well as that of the world (with its demand for balance, for order snatched or woven out of chaos). But the textile factory contains one other loom, to which nothing at all in the graphic novel corresponds – the loom of fate. This loom is fed by a cloud of parallel white threads, each of which initially unspools from one of an abacus-like array of huge spindles set in a vertical

106


wooden frame almost as high and as wide as the vast room in which it is housed, and erected next to some of its equally large, sunlightflooded windows (so that the threads themselves appear to emerge from that intense radiance). The threads begin to converge as they are run through a smaller vertical wooden frame before being fed horizontally into the working mechanism of the loom; and the fabric that is thereby produced extends across another horizontal surface that is translucent and brightly lit from below by a series of bulbs, before being wound onto a final roller. When Wesley is first shown this loom, Sloan tells him that ‘every culture in history has a secret code – one you won’t find in traditional texts’, and that the Fraternity began when the original guild of weavers ‘discovered a mystical language hidden in their fabric’. For every so often there are vertical threads that miss the weave and hence lie either on top of or below other threads for longer than expected; and these are not mistakes, but a code. If the missed thread is on top, its value is ‘1’, and if it is underneath, its value is ‘0’; in other words, we can see it as a binary code, and when its values are transcribed into a matrix laid out on the sheets of paper Sloan is carrying, they can be translated into letters of the alphabet. Each horizontal line of the matrix specifies a single letter, and the vertical sequence of letters thereby generated spells out a name – the name of the Fraternity’s next target; and when Wesley asks where the names come from, Sloan replies: ‘From out of a necessity – to maintain balance in the world… The loom provides; I interpret; you (like an apostle) deliver.’ Most immediately, then, the texture of this textile makes manifest the necessity that each Fraternity member must then weave into the fabric of the world. But I want to suggest that the loom of fate also constitutes an elaborate figure for the digital technology that makes possible the cinematic realization of its own pro-visions, its foreseeings of what must be, its prophecies – which are no sooner enunciated than realized. Here, we need to recall that in digital image capture, pictorial space is approached analytically, fragmented into regular rows and columns of small dots called pixels (picture elements), to each of which a discrete number is assigned, and which can then be subject to programmable transformations by computer. A digital camera is thus, in effect, a computer with a lens as an input device; it is a machine for converting inputs into symbolic notation. Hence any possible visual input can be simulated by the appropriate strings of symbols: it makes no difference whether they derive from a lens with charge-coupled receptors attached, or from a keyboard – hence the possibility of computer-generated


imagery. And although the conversion process can be reversed, so that the computer can be utilized to produce a visual image as output from a given string of symbols, that image is discontinuous with its proximate source (the symbol string) and a fortiori from any visual input from which that proximate source might itself be derived. What is striking about Wanted’s loom of fate is the extent to which its particular realization of the familiar trope of weaving has a range of distinctive features that seem uncannily responsive to the core characteristics of distinctively digital image-making. To begin with, the field of light from the factory window is disaggregated into discrete lines of white thread, with the array of spindles from which each thread originates laid out like a grid of pixels; then these elements are woven together to produce an apparently coherent or solid field or frame of fabric, hence something possessed of a dimension of depth as well as length and breadth (as if creating a third dimension from the interaction of the other two). The basic structural principle of the resulting textile (that of threads laid above or below one another) is isomorphic with that of a binary code – the basic form of computational language or symbolic notation. And in order for the content of that code to be properly apprehended – in order, that is, for us to see what the backlit textile screen already contains – it must undergo a further symbolic transformation, which generates the name of a particular human being; immediately thereafter, the hidden subject of this woven screen is visually presented to us on the screen of an emphatically digital camera (given to Wesley by Fox immediately after Sloan’s exemplary transcription exercise). And what this general homology specifically emphasizes is the significance of the moment of interpretation – the moment linking what the loom provides with what its apostles deliver. This role – resembling that of an oracle, or an oracle’s priest – is occupied by Sloan; and as the film’s narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that Sloan has been abusing his position. When the loom provided his own name as a target for assassination (and then later – so he claims – provided the names of pretty much every other member of the Fraternity), he concealed this fact, and instead began to provide his apostles with names deriving not from the loom’s fateful workings but rather from other sources willing to pay him for access to the Fraternity’s lethal services. Sloan’s apostasy thus underlines a possibility inherent in the process of digital image-making – that of exploiting the discontinuity between the image captured and the image displayed by manipulating the symbolic notation that mediates between provision and delivery. Sloan

108


exercises the control that interpretative mastery of that notation gives to any user of digital technology in order to generate utterly compelling illusions – to attribute world-historical significance to individuals lacking in any such attributes, to render criminal self-interest as the obscure promptings of otherworldly destiny, and to eviscerate the Fraternity’s self-sacrificing devotion of any genuine substance. In short, every aspect of the world into which Wesley is initiated is fake: what is presented to him as the underlying meaning of life is mere appearance, entirely unrelated to reality. One thing survives the revelation of Sloan’s digital duplicity – Wesley’s enhanced powers of perception and action, his ability to slow down time and dance through space. Indeed, it is only by deploying them that Wesley is able utterly to destroy the Fraternity and its base, and ultimately to assassinate Sloan himself. But the film explicitly invites us to question the value of these powers in the absence of the communal context that gives them an obscure but salvific purpose. For when the last surviving Fraternity members are finally told by Sloan that their own names had been woven by the loom of fate, they face a choice: to act as their code requires (by accepting that their own deaths are necessary in order to rebalance the world) or to violate it (by killing Wesley despite knowing that his name was a construction of Sloan’s, and then continuing to act as assassins for hire). But whereas most choose to violate the code, Fox chooses to follow it – and she does so by firing a single bullet in a curve so tight that its trajectory forms a perfect circle, passing in turn through the head of each Fraternity member in the executioners’ ring around Wesley, before finally returning to penetrate her own skull. So Fox is willing to turn her super-powers upon herself, and indeed to eliminate every other loom-nominated possessor of such powers from the world, rather than uproot her faith in the loom and its workings. It is as if, when rooted in the faith that legitimates them, their most extreme expression must take a self-annihilating form; Fox’s end is thus an apotheosis of the self-sacrificial ethos of the Fraternity. Their willingness to conceal their true natures and activities from the world, their submission to extremes of physical and psychological punishment in the course of their initiation into the Fraternity, and their reduction of themselves to perfectly-designed tools of a will lying outside their own: this self-denial reaches its perfect expression in Fox’s submission to the loom’s obscure demand that she and her fellow-members kill themselves, and thereby destroy the only means by which the loom’s prophetic visions might be realised in the world, which amounts to making themselves servants of the loom’s self-destruction.


Interpreted in terms of the Fraternity’s own code, this demand can only be understood to mean that the best way of maintaining the balance or order of the world is for the present world to be deprived of the sole way in which that balance had hitherto been maintained, as well as of any conception that the world possesses such an order or balance, let alone that it might be under threat. This is not only not inconsistent: it might even be thought of as a purification or intensification of what it means to believe in fate; for if things really are fated to unfold in a certain way, then they can require no help from a group of believers in order to do so. What, then, of Wesley – the sole survivor of the Fraternity, an apostle whose powers are essentially undiminished but (deprived of the loom’s promptings) with nothing to deliver by their exercise? Since his name never really emerged from the loom of fate, his refusal to commit suicide does not violate the Fraternity’s code; and neither does his culminating assassination of Sloan, since Sloan’s name came up a long time ago, and hence rendered his death a necessity. On the other hand, the necessity of that death was overdetermined from Wesley’s point of view: for Sloan’s duplicity centrally involved persuading Wesley that his true father – the Fraternity member who first discovered Sloan’s treachery, and thereafter strove to destroy the Fraternity – had recently assassinated his father, and was now intent on assassinating Wesley himself. Hence Sloan brings it about that Wesley assassinates his own father whilst under the impression that he is avenging his father’s death; it is only after the lethal bullet has been delivered that Wesley’s victim reveals his true identity, and thereby reveals that he had actually been attempting to rescue his son. Since Wesley’s way of killing Sloan precisely mirrors his father’s way of killing a member of the Fraternity named ‘Mr. X’ (the event with which the film opens, and which it connives with Sloan in presenting as the death of Wesley’s father), the immediate implication of its presentation is that Wesley is not only primarily exacting vengeance upon Sloan rather than carrying out the loom’s dictates, but also that he is identifying with his father in so doing. But this impression is directly contradicted by Wesley’s voice-over characterization of his deed: he describes the set-up – in which someone pretends to be Wesley himself, safely returned to his office cubby-hole, in order to entice Sloan from hiding – by saying ‘This is not me fulfilling my duty; this is not me following in my father’s footsteps; this is not me saving the world. This is not me – this is just a motherfucking decoy. This is me taking control from Sloan, from the Fraternity, from Janice [the office manager], from

110


Lisa and Barry [his cheating girlfriend and best friend]; this is me taking back control of my life.’ On one level, Wesley is stating the literal truth: where Sloan sees Wesley himself, he is in fact seeing a decoy, a double or fake Wesley. But Wesley is also denying that in killing Sloan he is following in his father’s footstep – that is, he denies that he does so in order to save the world (from the Fraternity leader’s perversion of its original commitment to save the world), which is what he would be doing if he were killing Sloan solely because the loom had required it. If what he is really doing is taking back control, then if Wesley identifies himself with anyone in this scenario it is not his father but Sloan – since control and manipulation is Sloan’s defining characteristic as the loom’s sanctified interpreter. In other words, despite his belated discovery that his father had risked his own life in order to make it possible for his son to escape the Fraternity’s misdirection of his powers, Wesley ends the film by dedicating himself to their continued use in the pursuit of personal rather than cosmic goals – as a mode of self-affirmation rather than self-denial. The culminating expression of his stance occurs as the final moment of the film, when – after having despatched his bullet on its long but fatal journey to Sloan’s skull – Wesley turns from the gunsight to gaze out at us, the viewers of this movie, and concludes his aria of recovering control by asking or rather snarling: ‘What the fuck have you done lately?’ Here, Wanted returns to its comic-book origins, by inflecting a distinctive and disturbing gesture to which the graphic novel of the same name resorts in its concluding pages. At that point, having constructed a narrative which culminates in Wesley’s getting the girl, the cash and mastery over the secret masters of the world, Wesley’s own voice addresses his readers, and expresses his loathing of them. ‘Why should you give a shit how my life works out? You’re killing yourself working twelve-hour days getting fat on cheap food and your girlfriend is almost certainly fucking other guys. Just because you’ve got a plasmascreen TV and a big DVD collection doesn’t mean you’re a free man… you’re just a well-paid slave like all the other cattle out there. Even this comic was just a fifteen-minute respite from how hard we’re working you. You used to think the world was always like this, didn’t you? The wars, the famine, the terrorism, and the rigged elections. But now you know better, right? Now you know what happened to the superheroes and you know the funny thing? You know what makes me laugh now I’m on the other side? You’re just going to close this book and buy something else to fill that big, empty void we’ve created in your life.’


Then, after depicting someone buying a copy of the very comic-book we’re holding, the final panel (taking up a whole page) depicts Wesley’s snarling features screaming the following words directly at us: ‘This is my face while I’m fucking you in the ass.’ The graphic novel thus ends by identifying and condemning the very mechanisms of identification and wish-fulfilment that are a condition of its own possibility. It explicitly declares its author’s awareness that Wesley himself is a depiction of his readers as down-trodden, dissatisfied and self-loathing individuals whose deepest fantasy is to find themselves to be extraordinary – possessed of powers by means of which the rest of the herd might be carelessly crushed and variously exploited in the name of acquiring rewards that life otherwise inexplicably fails to provide. We can only have reached the point at which our surrogate’s ferocious face and words confront us if we have given ourselves over to, and taken pleasure in, his increasingly joyful acquisition of the ability to punish, violate and kill anyone in his way, simply in the name of self-aggrandisement. But we don’t act on the knowledge this give us about ourselves – either by genuinely acting out those fantasies or by attempting to get beyond them; instead, we endlessly substitute one iteration of the fantasy for the next, thereby simultaneously maintaining the fantasy and intensifying our loathing of ourselves as their truly impotent addicts. Even a graphic novel which explicitly and violently declares its own contribution to the means by which our culture at once stokes and neutralizes those fantasies cannot compel us to face up to our involvement in that larger system. Instead, its condemnations are fated merely to constitute a reflexive continuation of the very masochistic processes it identifies and asks us to consider overcoming; it furiously predicts that its ferocious critique of itself and its readers will merely strengthen their sense of self-loathing, and simply encourage them to assuage it by buying the next instalment of those fantasies. What, then, should we make of the film’s way of inflecting this culminating confrontation with its audience? If we are in a position to be addressed by this Wesley’s accusing question, then what we have been doing most recently is watching this film, and its essentially digital portrayal of Wesley’s translation from the realm of ordinary life to that of Fraternal hyper-reality. Presumably, then, we have so far found the film’s portrayal of Wesley’s desperate desire to find himself extraordinary, and to give expression to that extraordinariness in lethal ways that are nevertheless morally licensed by the underlying meaning of the world, to be capable not only of maintaining our interest but of providing us with satisfactions of a very particular kind. Just as Sloan is

112


able to make Wesley into a parricide only because he is deeply drawn to a fantasy of himself as possessed of super-powers and of the right to use them in violation of ordinary moral restraints, as a prince of the world inexplicably abandoned to peasant life, as a secret master of the universe; so we have stayed with Wesley to the end of his initiation only because we are deeply drawn to a protagonist through whom we too can indulge exactly those fantasies – even in the face of this film’s unrelenting and hyperbolic emphasis upon the actual consequences of their indulgence (the torn flesh, the streaming blood, the broken bones, the extinguished lives). Indeed, the film rather downplays the damage done to others by the assassins in favour of emphasizing the extent to which their methods of training are structured in sado-masochistic ways: Wesley’s initiation is a long drawn-out sequence of beatings and knifings, his flesh repeatedly bruised, bloodied and sliced open only to be miraculously healed by the Fraternity’s accelerated recovery process and subjected to further punishment. On the surface, the point of this exercise is to bring Wesley to admit his disorientation: the key breakthrough in his training comes after one of Fox’s beatings leads him to tell her that he doesn’t know who he is. It is as if the physical punishment he suffers is a way of breaking through the alienation from his own existence that his use of anti-anxiety drugs merely intensifies. But beneath the surface, the film’s use of digital technology to dwell upon the reality of that punishment invites us to consider the possibility that Wesley also views it as an end in itself – as a kind of confirmation of his own worthlessness, a merited punishment for the sheer fact of his embodied existence and the valuelessness of what he has hitherto made of it. What, then, of those of us who view his suffering? Insofar as we identify with its victim, do we also identify with his sense of desert? Do we share his inchoate sense that no punishment can be too painful if it provides access to a way of understanding and inhabiting the world according to which we are numbered among its secret masters? Part of what encourages us to go so far with Wesley is his endearing realization by James McAvoy – someone whose previous work on film (including ‘Atonement’) placed him on the brink of stardom (a destiny that his subsequent choice of a starring role in this kind of film seems designed to help realize). And the film shows a certain awareness of this aspect of its own impact when it first depicts Wesley in the recovery room: his enhanced metabolic rate is itself enhanced by immersion in a bath of a viscous, milky fluid that congeals around its occupant, and so we see McAvoy’s face as a white mould, a perfect mask through which


his real features break through in shock and relief – quite as if his real individual presence is incapable of being repressed by the film’s attempts to cast him in a certain inherited character mould. For McAvoy’s screen presence almost helplessly fails to foreground the more shamelessly unattractive aspects of the comic-book Wesley: his fear and hatred of ethnic minorities, his misogyny, his generalized contempt. McAvoy’s Wesley is significantly more self-deprecating, morally troubled and above all witty in his responses to the Fraternity’s methods; he projects a certain kind of detachment from its self-involved portentousness that enhances our willingness to identify with him. And yet, McAvoy’s attractiveness only makes his final, snarled question to us all the more effectively disturbing. For now, it seems, the actor is being subsumed in his damaged and damaging character; more precisely, he is committing himself to a life lived within the confines of his fantasy, quite as if his assassination of Sloan is designed to make a space within which he can inherit what Sloan stands for without Sloan himself standing in his way. And what Sloan stands for in relation to the viewers of Wanted is, precisely, the possibilities of control and manipulation of reality that the technology of digital imagery embodies. For what most fundamentally reinforces our attraction to the world that attracts Wesley is the film’s unprecedented capacity to present superhuman levels of physical prowess as real, as happening right in front of our eyes. But Wesley’s ultimate fate implies that the result of such digitally-achieved hyperbolic realism is a certain loss of faith in the real world, a willingness to withdraw from any engagement with reality in favour of inhabiting a fantasy with which that reality can now much more easily be confused. One might say: if one regards the underlying truth about reality as that which can be given expression in terms of an infinitely manipulable code, then one loses its texture or tactility – a certain dimension of depth of the kind to which the original guild of weavers is shown as being primarily responsive through their searching fingertips (before Sloan’s magnifying lens transposes this into an essentially visual investigation of the loom’s of fate’s unending textile). The film underlines this by almost flaunting the way in which, in the digitally-realized and identical assassinations of Mr. X and Sloan, the lethal bullet’s re-emergence from its victim’s skull in each case has the perceptual effect of reducing their faces to essentially two-dimensional representations, mere masks or moulds of their originating individual physiognomies (akin to Wesley’s face in the recovery room), quite as if they had been drawn like a panel in a graphic novel or otherwise painted onto the screen (as, in a sense, they

114


have). The very thing that makes the physically impossible nevertheless perceivable simultaneously deprives the beings thereby presented to us of their full physical reality. If this is what digitally-achieved stardom requires or exacts, who would want to realize their fantasy of stardom? This is not to say that the film regards earlier cinematic modes of presenting reality – call them essentially photographic – as untainted by any equivalent dangers. After all, the alternative Wesley ultimately rejects in the culminating moments of the film is that represented by his real father (known as Cross – played by Thomas Kretschmann); and he is systematically associated with technology more primitive than the essentially digital resources commanded by Sloan and his colleagues. In the shoot-out in the pharmacy, where Fox commands video equipment that can see around corners, Cross uses only a mirror; and whereas she escapes in a gleaming sports car, he has to commandeer a petfood van. And his defining relation to his son is mediated in both directions by photography: Wesley first sees his supposedly-assassinated father in a series of photographs shown to him by Sloan; and Cross is eventually revealed to have been living almost next-door to Wesley ever since he abandoned him and his mother after his birth, in a flat decorated with photographs of his son taken by a long-distance lens that occupies the same place in the flat as the gun with which Cross kills Mr. X (and Wesley will kill Sloan). This association itself relates Cross to a broader, more episodic, appearance of figures for photographic modes of cinema – such as the film’s frequent resort to lines of rectangular windows (such as those behind which one assassination target resides), and in the repeated presentation of sequences of train-windows (both the elevated railway in Wesley’s home city, and the windows of the train on which he finally confronts his father in Moravia), all of which resemble not only the panels of a comic strip but more forcefully (given their purely horizontal linear structure) the arrangement of strips of celluloid film ready for projection. Given this resemblance, the scene in which the train carrying Wesley and Cross first halts on a bridge over a vertiginous valley, then breaks in two and plunges into the void, can in certain moods seem rather like a strip of film snapping in its passage through a projector. And when their carriage jams between the chasm’s sides, and the camera swoops up to it from underneath, to show both men in foetal silhouette, each lying on their own frame of window-glass, the analogy with frames of film seems unavoidable. If so, photography seems to engender a lethal separation between father and son rather than a means of reconciliation and mutual


acknowledgement (as does the father’s preference for a photographically-mediated relation to his son after his abandonment of him). Indeed, to save himself from Fox after killing his father on that train, Wesley has to shoot through the pane of glass on which both were standing and drop out of the confinement it imposes – thus mirroring Fox’s earlier decision to stop watching the confrontation between Wesley and Cross from without and actually become a participant by driving her car through one of its windows (not to mention Mr. X’s attempts to avoid assassination by propelling himself at superhuman speed through a plate-glass office window, so that – seen from head-on he seems to be breaking through a perfect visual image of himself, as if shattering a translucent mould or cocoon that threatened to constitute a lethal constraint). Since all three of these frame-busting exploits depend on digital manipulation for their cinematic presentation, should we not conclude that the computer constitutes more of a life-enhancing power than photography? It depends on how one interprets the effect of these digital violations of the photographic frame. After all, Fox is only driven to participate in the world behind the train-window screen because she wants to kill one of its inhabitants; Mr. X.’s leap through the office window only lands him precisely where Cross wanted him from the outset – in the right place to receive his long-distance bullet, the cinematic presentation of which requires that he be reduced once more to a two-dimensional visual image; and Wesley saves himself from Fox by his actions, but the control that he thereby regains over himself and his world ultimately delivers him over to a morally lethal fantasy of himself as secret master of the universe. One might therefore say that, whereas photographic presentations of reality demand our willingness to accept being screened from that reality as the price of its mode of presence to us (as if apprehending it through a pane of glass, beyond our control), digital presentations of reality can make anything whatever seem real, but only at the cost of reducing reality to mere manipulable appearance (as if essentially within our control). To put the matter in the Fraternity’s terms: fate and destiny (two threads in the idea of the real world as the source and field of enigmatic necessities) are notions that point towards the domain of the photographic, insofar as the result of a non-digital camera’s transcription of reality is ultimately determined by that reality and yet not predictable from it (as an actor’s transformation into a star ultimately depends on how the camera takes up and projects his physiognomy on screen). In this sense, photography presents reality itself as cinematic reality’s secret master, whereas for digital technology

116


that secret master is nothing other than digital technology itself. But neither mode of cinematic presentation of reality seems capable of putting in question the very idea that reality has a secret master, or a secret to master; hence neither encourages the viewers it presupposes and constructs to question their apparent enslavement to the desire to apprehend reality as mastered or masterable.

Reference Mark Millar 2008. Wanted. London: Titan Books.

Filmography Wanted (Timur Bekmambetov, USA/Germany, 2008).

7 Film, Literature and Non-Cognitive Affect Amy Coplan and Derek Matravers

In as much as the study of film has drawn in philosophy, it has tended to draw on the French and the German traditions. However, for the past twenty years an increasing literature has grown up in the AngloAmerican tradition. Thanks in part to the publication of the anthology Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Theory, this has tended to be brought under the heading of ‘cognitive film theory’ (Bordwell and Carroll 1996). This, as the editors of the anthology attempt to make clear, is misleading in suggesting a common approach rather than, as is characteristic of Anglo-American philosophy, an eschewal of grand theory and a journeyman approach to problems. Having said that, the editors of the anthology provide a broad characterization of the cognitive approach which fits with the approach taken in this chapter: We think that cognitivism is best characterised as a stance. A cognitivist analysis or explanation seeks to understand human thought, emotion, and action by appeal to processes of mental representation, naturalistic processes, and (some sense of) rational agency. (Bordwell and Carroll 1996: xvi) Although falling within this broad approach, the topic discussed here is a set of mental states arguably marginalized in the mainstream cognitive approach: namely, those (such as feelings, moods and other affective states) that lack a cognitive element. To that extent, we are attempting to draw the attention of the cognitive approach to an element dominant in early cinema: namely, cinema as a source of spectacle and affect when, as Tom Gunning has written, it had a ‘freedom from creation of a diegesis, its accent on direct stimulation’ (Gunning 117

118


1986: 66). We both consider this to be important in understanding our engagement with cinema. The chapter arose out of work that both authors have been doing on the role of non-cognitive affect: Amy Coplan in engagement with cinema, and Derek Matravers in engagement with literary narrative (Matravers 1998: ch. 5; Coplan 2006). They agree on their broad philosophical assumptions; however, there are some sharp points of disagreement which is why the chapter has the form it does of an argument by Coplan and a reply by Matravers. They agree on what a non-cognitive affective state is, how it is generated, and its importance in a full understanding of our engagement with a work of art. Where they disagree is that Coplan thinks that film possesses resources for the arousal of noncognitive affect that literary narratives cannot match. Matravers’ reply is two-fold: that it is characteristic of certain kinds of film (particularly adaptations) that they lack certain resources available to literary narrative and, furthermore, that there are some characteristics of film that disadvantage it in comparison to literature in arousing affect. They agree, however, that there is much further work that needs to be done.

Amy Coplan: film and non-cognitive affect According to the cognitive theory of emotion, the dominant view in philosophy and psychology, prototypical emotions such as anger, fear, and disgust are mental states that either require or are identical to a cognitive evaluation or judgment and are directed at specific objects. Robert Solomon describes emotions as evaluative judgments that structure our world (Solomon 2004: 76–88) while Martha Nussbaum defines them as judgments assenting to value-laden appearances (Nussbaum 2004: 183–99). For cognitive theorists, sadness either is or requires the belief or judgment that one has lost something valuable, and fear is or requires the belief or judgment that one or one’s loved ones are in danger. Proponents of the cognitive theory of emotion do not deny that many emotions involve bodily feelings. Nevertheless, their accounts emphasize the cognitive dimensions of emotion, arguing that the belief or cognitive evaluation is what is essential. Over the past few years, philosophers Jenefer Robinson and Jesse Prinz have challenged the cognitive theory of emotion and each has developed an alternative view. Robinson characterizes emotions as ongoing causal processes that involve instinctive appraisals and ready us for appropriate action (Robinson 2005: 57–99). Prinz argues that emotions are embodied appraisals, a special form of perception of the

Film, Literature and Non-Cognitive Affect

119

body and of our relations to the world (Prinz, 2004a: 52–78, 2004b: 44–58, 2007: 50–86). Robinson and Prinz accept that many emotion episodes involve cognition or are caused in part by a cognitive stimulus but neither considers a cognitive judgment to be necessary for emotion since it is possible for us to respond emotionally to a perceptual stimulus in an immediate and automatic way prior to making a cognitive evaluation. Philosophers and psychologists often use the following sort of example to illustrate. Suppose I am walking in the woods and I see a curvy shaped object on the ground. After a few moments, I realize that it’s just a stick. Nevertheless, prior to my realization, the mere visual perception of this object is enough to make me afraid, and my fear occurs prior to my judging the object to be a snake or judging that the object is dangerous. I can go on to make such judgments but my fear response will be triggered first (LeDoux, 1998: 126–78; Robinson, 2005: 37–52). Recent empirical evidence, particularly that of Joseph LeDoux and Robert Zajonc, strongly supports the type of theory held by Robinson and Prinz over the cognitive theory of emotion, and thus there is good reason to believe that emotions can be non-cognitive though they do not have to be. This is a critical point. One can hold a non-cognitive theory of emotion and still grant that many emotions involve cognitive evaluations. The key point for such theorists is that what makes the emotion emotion is the affective or bodily dimension of it. Judgments in the absence of such affect will not qualify as emotions. Even if one subscribes to a cognitive theory of emotion and thus denies the possibility of non-cognitive emotions, one can still acknowledge the existence of non-cognitive affect. Affect is a broad category that includes a wide range of mental states, all involving feelings and some type of physiological arousal. Affective states are not necessarily directed at specific objects nor do they necessarily involve cognitive evaluations or appraisals so even if there can be no non-cognitive emotions, there can be non-cognitive affective experiences including emotional contagion, moods, and automatic affective reflexes (Robinson, 2005: 57–99; Coplan, 2010: 132–51). Emotional contagion is ‘the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person, and, consequently, to converge emotionally’ (Hatfield et al., 1994: 153–4). In other words, emotion is transmitted from one person to another person; it is as though one individual ‘catches’ the emotion of another. The main processes involved in contagion are motor mimicry and the activation and feedback from mimicry. Emotional contagion usually occurs so quickly that it is difficult to be

120


fully aware of it as it is happening. I characterize it as a non-cognitive affective response because it occurs not as a result of a cognitive judgment or evaluation but automatically and involuntarily in response to the mere perception of others’ emotions. The recent discovery of mirror neurons and mirroring processes provides more evidence for mirroring responses in humans. The data is especially robust for disgust and fear (Iacoboni, 2008:106–29; Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, 2008: 173–93; Goldman, 2006: 113–46). Another type of affective response that need not be cognitive is mood. Moods are affective states much like emotions but lacking highly specific objects and typically lasting for a longer duration than prototypical emotions. In spite of their frequency, they have received minimal attention from philosophers including philosophers of art. Some important exceptions to this include Martin Heidegger who develops a sophisticated theory of moods in Being and Time, Greg Smith, Laura Sizer, and Noel Carroll. Moods include states such as free-floating anxiety, dread, depression, melancholy, gloom, and cheer. Psychologists and philosophers characterize moods as more globally oriented than emotions and as more diffuse. Moods can have nothing as their objects or everything as their objects. Moreover, moods often cannot be justified in the same way that emotions can because they lack specific objects and yet in spite of the differences between emotions and moods, they are very similar phenomenologically and we often use the same words to describe them (Carroll 2003: 521–55). Automatic affective responses such as startle make up a third group of non-cognitive affective responses. These responses are universal and involuntary; they occur in response to sensory stimuli such as loud noises or sudden movements. Startle involves a characteristic facial expression, an immediate closing of the eyes, a widening of the mouth, an immediate galvanic skin response, and cardiac changes (that is, an increase in blood pressure and changes in breathing patterns) (Robinson 1995: 53–4, 2005: 60–61). One of the distinguishing features of film as an artistic medium is its ability to produce non-cognitive affective responses, which viewers experience as a result of film’s direct sensory engagement. Through the deployment of visual and aural information, film can evoke intense feelings in us that are independent of and sometimes even incompatible with our cognitive judgments of what we are watching (Smith 1995: 102–6; Coplan 2006: 26–38). This is part of what makes film such a powerful medium. Noel Carroll argues that through the use of various cinematic techniques, filmmakers are able to exploit these responses: ‘Manipulating


121

such variables as speed, scale, lighting, and sound, among others, the filmmaker often appears to have direct access to our nervous system, bypassing the cerebral cortex and triggering automatic affective reflexes’ (Carroll 2003: 524). Elsewhere I have hypothesized that non-cognitive affective experiences occur in response to film far more often than we realize and that they play a more significant role in spectatorial response than the academic literature suggests (Coplan, 2006: 26–38, 2008: 65–86). Here I am arguing that films are able to directly influence viewers’ affective states without cognitive mediation and thus are often more powerful and effective than literature, at least with respect to affective responses. To be clear, I am not claiming that film only elicits non-cognitive affect or even that this is the most common type of affect it elicits. The first claim is certainly false and the second is an empirical question that I am unqualified to answer. My claim is that there are features of the film medium and particular cinematic techniques that reliably elicit non-cognitive affects and that filmmakers are also able to design scenes, shots, and sound so as to intensify emotional states through non-cognitive mechanisms, which is to say that filmmakers are able to increase our levels of affective arousal without cognitive engagement. Among the techniques filmmakers have for doing this that are unavailable to writers of literary narratives include various forms of camera movement and shot composition, editing styles, lighting design, set design including the color, placement, and relationship of various objects in the diegetic world, and sound design. Every shot of a human subject has a specific size, customarily referred to as a full shot (the subject’s whole body), a medium shot (from the waist up), and a close up (from the neckline up). Variants between these also exist (for example, a medium close-up, which is from the chest up). Subject size is determined by the distance of the camera to the subject and the focal length of the lens used (the focal length of a lens determines, among other things, its magnification of the image). A highly conventional editing style within a scene is to begin the scene with wider shots and progress toward tighter and tighter shots, so that, by the time the scene has reached its climax, the subjects are shown in close-up. Close-ups are one of the best ways to produce emotional contagion responses. By focusing spectators’ attention on the face and emotions of a character, filmmakers increase the likelihood of motor mimicry and afferent feedback, the processes involved in emotional contagion. Contagion can occur regardless of whether or not we sympathize or

122


empathize with a character, or even know anything about his or her experience; it is automatic and involuntary. All that is required is the perception and observation of a vivid image; close-ups provide this (Smith, 1995: 102–6; Plantinga, 1999: 239–55; Coplan, 2006: 26–38). Sound design and music are both enormously effective at eliciting affective responses. Both have the capacity to trigger emotional contagion and to alter or intensify mood, prototypical emotions, and emotional processes such as sympathy and empathy. In addition, they often cause automatic affective responses that are immediate and largely involuntary. Take, for example, the opening scene of Punch Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2002, USA), which nicely illustrates how sound design can be used for maximal affective effect. First we are introduced to the film’s protagonist, Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) who is on the phone, sitting alone at a desk in a large empty room with concrete walls and floors. Ninety seconds into the film, Barry goes outside into the warehouse parking lot, walks down the driveway and watches the street. We see what he sees, which is nothing unusual – some cars driving in the distance. Then, as we’re watching the street, all of a sudden and with no warning, an approaching car violently crashes, flipping over and through the air with the accompanying sound of smashing metal and glass. Anyone who has seen Punch Drunk Love will most likely remember this scene’s striking affective impact. Upon watching and hearing the crash, most viewers are physically shaken; they automatically cringe and draw back, just as the character Barry does as he watches and hears the crash. While there is all sorts of cognitive activity going on as we watch this sort of scene, the direct effect of the sound design bypasses complex processing and triggers an immediate affective appraisal. I suspect that the ability of sound design and music to engage viewers in such an immediate and way is, at least in part, what makes them so reliable at inducing affective responses. Our responses to sound design and music often happen outside of our awareness. In some cases, these responses occur through contagion like processes while in others, the sounds in the film automatically elicit affects such as startle (for a relevant discussion of startle as an automatic and involuntary affect, see Robinson: 1995, pp. 75–95; for more on automatic and contagion responses to film, see Robinson: 2005, pp. 379–412, and Davies, forthcoming). A common example of the type sound effect I have in mind is the sound of a heartbeat, which can be used in multiple ways to create anxiety and anticipation, as in Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979, USA) and Angel Heart (Alan Parker, 1987, USA). Another common example is the sound of breathing,


123

which is used throughout Alien and in the culminating scene of Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991, USA), when Clarice (Jodi Foster) anxiously pursues Jame ‘Buffalo Bill’ Gumb (Ted Levine) in the darkness of his lair-like house. In the last 20 years, with the invention of Dolby Digital Sound and other digital sound formats (Digital Theater Sound/System [DTS] and Sony Dynamic Digital Sound [DDS]), the dynamic range (the decibel level difference between the loudest sound and the noise floor of an audio format) of movies has increased dramatically, and as a result the peak sound level of movies is louder than ever before. This is often used to produce automatic reflexes such as startle in spectators. The most obvious examples of this are the very loud musical stings in horror movies that are typically preceded by relatively quiet passages, as in a movie like Scream (Wes Craven, 1996, USA). Digital sound formats are also capable of playing back extremely low frequency information at very loud levels, which can create a kind of visceral feeling of dread, as in the T-Rex’s footsteps in Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993, USA) or the lightning storm early in the recent remake of War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg, 2005, USA). In Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975, USA) Steven Spielberg set new standards for the use of non-diegetic sound and music. Recall, for example, the opening scene, in which Chrissie (Susan Backlinie), a young woman at a late night beach party, catches the eye of Tom (Jonathan Filley), another partygoer, and then leads him away from the bonfire to a more remote area of the beach. As he follows her, she begins running and taking off her clothes so that she can ‘go swimming.’ Though eager to join to her, Tom is too drunk to keep up, or stay conscious; he ends up passing out on the beach as Chrissie swims farther and farther from the beach. Most of us will find ourselves feeling anxious and uncomfortable as we watch this scene unfold. Our feelings can be partly explained by cognitive activity, such as thoughts, inferences, and attempts to figure out what is happening and what will happen next. And yet much of our overall response results from our direct sensory engagement with the images and sounds of the film and thus is not determined by high level cognitive processing. It is possible that many of us will already be in a state of anxiety and fear prior to seeing Chrissie get attacked, either because of the eerie underwater shots we saw during the opening credits and during which John Williams’s score primed us to anticipate something frightening, or because of genre expectations, that is, our expectation that something scary is bound to occur since we know that

124


Jaws fits into the category of ‘scary thriller.’ Even so, I hypothesize that any emotions or affects we are experiencing become much stronger because of the images, the editing, and, most importantly, the sounds design and music in this scene. As Tom follows Chrissie away from the bonfire, the sounds of the bonfire party – laughing, acoustic guitars, and so on – fade more and more so that the film is much quieter by the time that we get a medium shot of Chrissie, looking back toward the beach as she treads water. This has the effect of focusing our attention and heightening our affective response to what happens next. After Chrissie is jerked violently beneath the water the first time, she gasps and chokes. When she is jerked below again, she quickly reemerges, breathing extremely rapidly. As the attack continues, we hear her screaming, shrieking, and breathing heavily and quickly. We also hear the sounds of splashing and flailing as Chrissie is repeatedly seized from below, pushed through the water, and pulled violently in different directions. In addition to the sounds of Chrissie’s surprise, pain, and terror, there is Williams’s now famous score, which seems to have the ability to instantaneously take our affective experience from a 4 or 5 to an 8 or 9. In the case of this scene from Jaws, I suspect that our overall emotional response involves some relatively complex cognitive activities of the kind I mentioned above. Nevertheless, the intensity of our emotional response results from things non-cognitive. Spielberg and the other filmmakers have ramped up everything affectively through the use of sound, sound editing, and that terrifying thumping score. I submit that far more people have been terrified and avoided swimming in the ocean due to Spielberg’s Jaws than to Peter Benchley’s novel of the same name, on which the film is based, and this is not simply because more people saw the film than read the book. It is because of the intensity of the affective responses that Spielberg was able to elicit through the use of techniques unique to the cinematic medium. Once again, then, our emotions and affective responses are being determined by our perception and do not depend on higher order processing. Literature may be able to depict very vivid scenes and provide lots of details for our imaginations. In such cases, I think we often have strong emotional and affective responses. But literary narratives are outmatched in this regard, even the great ones because films are able to trigger our responses without going through the imagination. This is why, on average, we respond with more emotion and affect and with emotion and affect that are more intense when we watch films than when we read literary narratives. I am not suggesting that this makes


125

film superior artistically, only that they are far more effective when it comes to arousing affect. One final point about sound and music – they do not occur when we read literary narratives. Although some writers are brilliant when it comes to conjuring up sounds and describing all sorts of aural nuances, literary narratives never appeal directly to our sense of hearing. We do not listen to them, at least not in a literal or sensory way. Given how tremendously powerful sound and music are, this fact about the film medium in contrast to literature helps to explain why it so often arouses more affect and emotion, even when it is not especially good. So far I have provided only a very brief and cursory explanation of a few ways filmmakers can employ various techniques to elicit noncognitive affective responses and to intensify emotions and affects through non-cognitive means. There is much more to be said about multiple features of the this topic, such as the nature of non-cognitive affect, its role in viewer response, and the effects of various filmmaking techniques on viewer response (see, e.g. Plantinga 1999: 239–55, 2008: 86–96; Choi, 2003: 149–57; Coplan, 2006: 26–38, 2008: 65–86). My goal in this section of the chapter, however, has been to justify my claim that film narratives are typically better at eliciting non-cognitive affect than literary narratives. Before resting my case, I will discuss one more film scene: the opening of Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982, USA), which provides an existence proof of filmmakers’ ability to establish and elicit mood, even in the very first frames of a film. Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982, USA) is, famously, a kind of future noir or ‘cybernoir’ science fiction dystopia film that, when it was initially released, was more acclaimed for its design than its story. As the film begins, we get text on the screen accompanied by both atmospheric sound effects and a distinctive score by the composer Vangelis. Scott then cuts to a shot of Los Angeles at night with brilliant lights and flame bursts filling up the sky. The effect of the Vangelis score, the sound effects, the sweeping shot of the city, and the extremely detailed mise en scene is striking, so much so that most viewers are immediately affected by the scene, but not so much with emotion as with mood. Scott elicits a feeling more than a specific emotion. It is one of loneliness, gloom, alienation, and perhaps dread. It is difficult to describe, I contend, because it is mood and not emotion and thus it is not tied to a specific cognitive evaluation or judgment or to some specific narrative event but rather is attached to the entire world, which is dark, rainy and ominous. While it may be very difficult to name the feeling we have in

126


response to this opening scene, it is not at all difficult to recognize that we have a feeling. The mood elicited by the opening sequence of Blade Runner is another example of non-cognitive affect that occurs as a direct result of our direct sensory engagement with the visual and aural information that is presented. Put differently, our mood response is unmediated by higher order cognitive activity. And it is the unmediated nature of our response that makes it unique to our experience of film. With literature, there is no feeling without thinking. With film, there is. This project is much too big for a brief paper, but I hope that I have at least begun to make a reasonable case for the claim that film is a more powerful medium than literature when it comes to the arousal of affect and emotion. Of course this does not apply to all films or all literary narratives and there are many differences among individual viewers and readers and certain groups of viewers and readers that are relevant to the types of responses they will experience. Nonetheless, I submit that most of us most of the time get more worked up emotionally by moving images accompanied by sound than we do by even the best literature.

Derek Matravers: not as good as the book Jane Austen is thus a mistress of much deeper emotion than appears upon the surface. She stimulates us to supply what is not there. What she offers is, apparently, a trifle, yet is composed of something that expands in the reader’s mind and endows with the most enduring form of life scenes which are outwardly trivial (Woolf, 1925: 174). In her contribution to this paper, Amy Coplan contrasts two sorts of case (I shall take as my example Bladerunner, which is one of several convincing examples produced by Coplan). In the first sort of case, which we can call ‘the standard case,’ the audience will imagine some proposition (that Rachel has fallen in love with Deckard) and this will cause a number of other events (phenomenological and physiological), which together will form the emotion of (say) pity for Rachel. In the second sort of case the audience need imagine no proposition: aspects of the film (whether sound design, subject size in shot, mise en scene, lighting and so forth) act directly on the audience’s emotion or mood. Thus the music, together with the images underlying the opening credits, set up a mood of loneliness, alienation and dread that prime the audience’s response to the remainder of the film. Coplan follows an accepted distinction and separates emotion from mood. A mood need not take an


127

object (or, if it does, it takes a broad or indeterminate object). Hence, it need not have an imagined proposition as part of its content. The gist of Coplan’s argument is that film has the advantage over literature with respect to the second sort of case. This is because film can arouse affect directly, whereas, in literature, arousal is always mediated through our having to imagine propositions. In literary narratives the reader is faced with the sentences on the page. The only access they have to the content of the novel is to imagine the states of affairs those sentences describe. Hence, it looks as if the scenario Coplan describes above is impossible: the reader has no option but to imagine propositions, literature cannot act directly. Hence, her comment ‘literary narratives are outmatched in this regard, even the great ones because films are able to trigger our responses without going through the imagination.’ In spelling out the contrasting case, I have taken two liberties. First, the account of the emotion is incomplete: it is completely unclear what the relation is between the elements that make up the emotion. Are they simply conjoined? Some kind of amalgam? Although no answer seems adequate, this does not matter for the purposes of argument here. Coplan and I can agree that there is some emotion or emotion-like state that involves cognitions, or cognitive appraisal. The issue between us is over the second case: whether film enjoys a conspicuous advantage in being able to arouse this in a way that literature cannot. Second, I have said nothing about the nature of our imagining the content of a literary narrative. Is it merely propositional imagining? Visualising? I shall say a little more about this latter question. At the moment, all I want to do is set up the contrast that Coplan describes, in order to see if it can be substantiated. The rest of this reply will consist of two parts. First, I will argue that the fact that we engage with literary narrative through imagining propositions does not rule out the kinds of non-cognitive affect characteristic of the second case. Second, I will offer an illustrative example: comparing the film and book versions of a scene from Sense and Sensibility (Ang Lee, 1995, UK/USA), and make some countersuggestions about certain advantages literature might enjoy over film in terms of non-cognitive affect. Coplan’s argument depends on the claim that if an imagined proposition plays a role in the generation of the emotion (or emotionlike state) this cannot be a case of non-cognitive affect. As engaging with literary narrative necessarily involves imagining propositions, literary narrative cannot deal in non-cognitive affect. This neglects the possibility that we can imagine a proposition and this generate an

128


emotion (or emotion-like state) which is itself non-cognitive; in other words, in which the proposition plays no further part. For example, there are what Gricean linguists call ‘the pragmatic effects’ of a sentence (roughly, the ‘upshot’ of the sentence that goes beyond its literal meaning). A nice example is provided in the opening lines of Billie Holiday’s autobiography: ‘Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen and I was three’ (quoted in Cooper 1986: 83)). Our emotion (or emotion-like) reaction can be split into Coplan’s two cases. The first is emotion of pity (or whatever) for the young Billie which takes as its cognitive content the belief that her mother was unmarried and thirteen when she was born. The second is the non-cognitive reaction of surprise or shock engendered through the violation of a convention of communication that the relevant information is not left until the end of the sentence. There are other sources of non-cognitive affect in literary narrative. To see this, we need to get a better grasp of the nature of our imaginative engagement with films and books. There have been many attempts to specify the exact nature of such engagement. The locus classicus of the debate is Kendall Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe (Walton 1990). The literature on film has been summed up recently by Berys Gaut, with references to the key papers in the debate (Gaut 2004: 234–48). There is no equivalent literature on the nature of the make-believe played with literary narrative. This need not matter for my purposes as we can talk broadly of the experience of the viewer and the experience of the reader, although future work on the nature of the make-believe will, I think, throw more light on the contrast between film and literary narrative. Rather then deal with this in the abstract, I shall move straight to my promised example. What suggested to me that Coplan could not be right in denying the capacity of literary narrative to reach the affective heights of film was a devastating scene in the book which was not matched by the scene in the film. It is the scene in which Marianne (sensibility) receives the letter of rejection from Willoughby, a man for whom she has deep feelings, and is comforted by her sister, Elinor (sense). The screenplay for the film was by Emma Thompson (who played Elinor) for which she won an Oscar. I will compare the treatment of the scene by the book and by the film; the purposes of my doing so are not to show how the film, by not matching the book, is in some way deficient. First, it is not clear what relevance this would have for the capacity of books to elicit affective states, and second, it is not clear why not slavishly following the book would be a criticism. The film is billed as being ‘adapted from the novel by Jane Austen,’ and, even if it was not so billed, it is unclear why a film of a book should


129

follow the book; after all, if it is the book people would like to experience, it is still there for them to read. My point is only to attempt to give some grounds for the claim that the book’s treatment of the scene is more powerful than that of the film in terms of arousing non-cognitive affect. In the book, the scene occupies approximately 4500 words, which would take the average reader approximately 15 minutes to read. It begins with Mrs Jennings, Elinor and Marianne at the breakfast table. After breakfast, a letter is delivered, the receipt of which causes Marianne to leave the room. Elinor then has a brief conversation with Mrs Jennings and follows Marianne. Thereafter, the bulk of the scene follows: only the two sisters are present, and four letters are read (all by Elinor). In the film, the scene takes roughly three and a half minutes. Much dialogue is omitted: only one letter is read (by Marianne). Furthermore, new dialogue and episodes are introduced into the scene: Lucy Steele is at the breakfast table and is sharply rebuked by Elinor, and the entry of Mrs Jennings into the bedroom is brought forward (rather oddly, as this gives the film literally a few seconds to build up the atmosphere of horror before Mrs Jennings dissipates it). As an aside, there is a general point to be made here about the big budget film versions of classic novels. Commercial cinema needs to make a return on its investment. Feature films tend to be between 90 and 120 minutes long, and need to recoup the considerable investment that goes into making them (Sense and Sensibility is a fairly lengthy 136 minutes and cost $15.5 million; in its first year it took $43 million in the US alone). Deborah Kaplan has argued that commercial film versions of classic novels suffer from what she calls ‘harlequinization’. The plot structures are simplified, and the central live story foregrounded at the expense of subtlety and sub-plot (Kaplan 1998: 403). There are two points we can draw from this. The first is that one needs to view the film version of the scene against a background of pressures particular to works of this type. Second, another feature of harlequinization, of course, is schlock and cheap affect. Hence, if Kaplan’s claim is even in the right area, then questions of the value of non-cognitive affect can be raised with respect to the films that are usually less pressing with respect to the books on which they are based. Let us return to Coplan’s point, however, which concerned not the quality of the non-cognitive affect, but the means by which it is bought about. The key affective paragraph in the book reads as follows: Elinor drew near, but without saying a word; and seated herself on the bed, took her hand, kissed her affectionately several times, and then gave way to a burst of tears, which as first was scarcely less

130


violent than Marianne’s. The latter, though unable to speak, seemed to feel all the tenderness of this behavior, and after some time thus spent in joint affliction, she put all the letters into Elinor’s hands; and then covering her face with her handkerchief, almost screamed with agony. Elinor, who knew that such grief, shocking as it as to witness it, must have its course… (Sense and Sensibility, Vol II, Ch. VII). The line that shocks, that causes in this reader at least an involuntary sharp intake of breath, is ‘she put all the letters into Elinor’s hands; and then covering her face with her handkerchief, almost screamed with agony.’ Clearly, Coplan could (and I assume would) agree that we can feel immense pity for Marianne, caused by this fictional proposition, and which takes Marianne in her grief as its object; that is beside the point, as such a reaction is not non-cognitive affect. However, startle and shock are non-cognitive affects, and this line does startle and shock. One resource that the book is able to exploit is that, in Jane Austen’s world, the expression of emotion takes place within a fairly narrow compass. Slight variations in manner, choice of vocabulary, expressed likes and dislikes, even speaking for or against certain activities, take on a great emotional significance. Once this calibration has been established, Austen is able to shock by pushing an action off the scale. That is, the expectations one has for a work are set up in terms of the category in which one places that work (Walton 1970). If one reads Sense and Sensibility in the category of ‘Jane Austen novels’, one has some idea as to how to measure the significance of certain events. Under what category is it appropriate to see the film? If, as Kaplan suggests above, it is as a kind of Harlequin romance then Marianne’s actions will seem unexceptional. That is, readers of Jane Austen are immured in the restricted possibilities of emotional expression, hence Marianne’s behaviour comes like a slap in the face, whereas it is not infrequent or even unusual to find characters in mainstream romantic films throwing themselves weeping onto beds (Parrill 2002: 34). A more telling case could be made against Coplan if we had a clear idea of the nature of the imaginative engagement with literary narrative, and could show how non-cognitive affect could flow from that. However, as indicated above, the literature on this topic is as yet undeveloped hence the possibility of such argument is circumscribed. However, it is not the case that there is only a single method of cognitive processing; which method we use will depend on a variety of factors including the type of input, and our needs and expectations (Prentice and Gerrig 1999). It would be speculation to hold that we generally process film one way,


131

and literary narratives a different way (although further research on this topic would be welcome). However, there are ways in which engagement with literary narrative differs from that we have with film which suggest the cognitive processing will differ, and thus at least offer the potential for grounding differences in non-cognitive affect that is not necessarily to the disadvantage of literary narrative. I shall briefly mention two. The first is that, being a visual medium, films are cluttered; they cannot help but be. In addition to Marianne’s grief and the letter, there is acting, lighting, period costumes, period furniture and so on. In a literary narrative anything that is mentioned has been selected to be mentioned; hence, anything mentioned can be accorded the significance of something intentionally selected by the author (Scruton 1983: 123–4). This is not the reason something carries significance in a film; it carries significance for the same reason as it would carry significance if we were witnessing the scene face-to-face: because it is made visually salient. In a literary narrative, it is not that one’s attention is focused on the relevant details; what one is imagining are the relevant details. There is nothing to distract, no dissipation of the affect. To address Coplan’s point it is important here that this does not only sustain ‘feeling pity for Marianne’ (or some such cognitive state), it sustains the non-cognitive response of horror at the situation. The second and perhaps more obvious feature is that in literature, the reader can choose his or her own pace while in film the pace is dictated; the pictures move inexorably onward without pause (Chatman 1980: 121–30). One cannot dwell on the horror of Marianne’s abject state (especially, as noted above, Mrs Jennings comes bustling in almost straight away). One cannot turn it over in one’s mind, relating it to Marianne’s earlier claim that second romantic attachments are not possible and Elinor’s decisive put-down of her sensibility (if not a decisive put-down of the Romantic movement more generally) ‘it is not everyone who has your passion for dead leaves’. One can, as Virginia Woolf says in the epigraph to this reply, churn these over in one’s mind in the same way as a jilted lover might churn over betrayals in his or her mind, to generate, once again, not cognitively-laden emotions, but something akin to horror. In summary, individual experiences will differ: I do not find literary narrative lags behind film in its manipulation of non-cognitive affect. Literary narrative arousing non-cognitive affect is compatible with the claim that imagining propositions is a necessary step on the way. Our knowledge of the psychological structure of our engagement with either

132


film or narrative is not yet detailed enough for us to be able to decide the question more decisively.

Conclusion In a sense this is a family squabble as we both agree that progress on these matters is to be made by detailed consideration of the psychology of engaging with the different media. Some of these results are unsurprising, such as that recall of scenes witnessed and recall of scenes described differ (Johnson 1988: 391–2). Others are more surprising, such as that engagement with literary narratives is intensely circumscribed – strongly suggesting that visualization is not typical of such engagement (Gerrig 1993: 30–40). What remains uncertain, and what we have been attempting to make progress with in this exchange, is the extent to which the capacity to elicit non-cognitive affect underpins differences in engagement.

Bibliography D. Bordwell and N. Carroll (eds) (1996) Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press). N. Carroll (2003) ‘Art and Mood: Preliminary Notes and Conjectures,’ The Monist, 86 (4), 521–56. S. Chatman (1980) ‘What Novels Can Do That Films Can’t (and Vice Versa),’ Critical Inquiry, 7 (1), 121–40. J. Choi, (2003) ‘Fits and Startles: Cognitivism Revisited,’ The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 61 (2), 149–57. D.E. Cooper (1986) Metaphor (London: Aristotelian Society). A. Coplan (2006) ‘Catching Characters’ Emotions: Emotional Contagion Responses to Narrative Fiction Film,’ Film Studies, 8, 26–38. A. Coplan (2008) ‘Empathy and Character Engagement’ in Livingston and Plantinga (eds), Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (Abingdon, UK and New York: Routledge), 97–110. A. Coplan (2010) ‘Feeling Without Thinking: Lessons from the Ancients on the Nature of Emotion and Virtue-acquisition,’ Metaphilosophy, 41 (1–2), 132–51. D. Davies (2009) ‘Form and Feeling in Terence Malick’s Thin Red Line’ in Davies (ed.) The Thin Red Line, (Abingdon, Oxon UK and New York: Routlege), 65–86. S. Davies, (forthcoming) ‘Infectious music: Music-Listener emotional contagion’ in Coplan and Goldie (eds) Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press). B. Gaut (2004) ‘The Philosophy of the Movies: Cinematic Narration’ in Kivy (ed.) The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell), 230–53. R.J. Gerrig (1993) Experiencing Narrative Worlds: on the Psychological Activities of Reading (Boulder: Westview Press).


133

A. I. Goldman (2006) Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press). T. Gunning (1986) ‘The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Is Spectator and the Avant Garde,’ Wide Angle, 8 (3–4), 63–70. Hatfield, Cacioppo and Rapson (1994) Emotional Contagion (New York: Cambridge University Press). M. Iacoboni (2008). Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect With Others (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux). M.K. Johnson (1988) ‘Reality Monitoring: An Experimental Phenomenological Approach,’ Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 117 (4), 390–4. D. Kaplan (1998) ‘Mass Marketing Jane Austen: Men, Women and Courtship in Two Film Adaptations’ in Troost and Greenfield (eds), Jane Austen in Hollywood (Lexington: The University of Kentucky), 177–87. J.E. LeDoux (1998) The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (New York: Touchstone Books). D. Matravers (1998) Art and Emotion (New York: Oxford University Press). M. Nussbaum (2004) ‘Emotions as Judgments of Value and Importance’ in Solomon (ed.), Thinking About Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotion (New York: Oxford University Press), 183–99. S. Parrill (2002) Jane Austen on Film and Television: A Critical Study of the Adaptations (Jefferson: McFarland and Co.). C. Plantinga (1999) ‘The Scene of Empathy and the Human Face on Film’ in Plantinga and Smith (eds), Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press), 2395. C. Plantinga (2008) ‘Emotion and Affect’ in Livingston and Plantinga (eds), Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (Abingdon, UK and New York: Routledge), 86–96. D.A Prentice and R.J. Gerrig (1999) ‘Exploring the Boundary Between Fiction and Reality’ in Chaiken and Trope (eds) Dual Process Theories in Social Psychology (London: The Guilford Press), 529–46. J. Prinz (2004a) ‘Embodied Emotion’ in Solomon (ed.), Thinking About Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotion (New York: Oxford University Press), 44–58. J. Prinz (2004b) Gut Reactions (New York: Oxford University Press). J. Prinz (2007) The Emotional Construction of Morals (New York: Oxford University Press). G. Rizzolatti, C. Sinigaglia and F. Anderson (2008). Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions (New York: Oxford University Press). J. Robinson (2005) Deeper than Reason: Emotion and its Role in Literature, Music, and Art (New York: Oxford University Press). R. Scruton (1983) ‘Photography and Representation’ in The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Art (London: Methuen), 102–26. M. Smith, (1995) Engaging characters: Fiction, Emotion and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press). R. Solomon (2004) ‘Emotions, Thoughts, and Feelings: Emotions as Engagements with the World’ in Solomon (ed.) Thinking About Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotion (New York: Oxford University Press), 76–88. K. Walton (1970) ‘Categories of Art’ in Margolis (ed.) Philosophy Looks at the Arts (Philadelphia: Temple University Press), 53–79.

134


K. Walton (1990) Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press). V. Woolf (1925) The Common Reader (London: The Hogarth Press).

Filmography Angel Heart. Dir. Alan Parker. 1987. DVD. Lions Gate. 2004. Blade Runner: the Final Cut. Dir. Ridley Scott. 2007. DVD. Warner Bros. 2007. Jaws. Dir. Steven Spielberg. 1975. DVD. Universal Studios. 2005. Jurassic Park. Dir. Steven Spielberg. 1993. DVD. Universal Studios. 2000. Punch Drunk Love. Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson. 2002. DVD. Sony Pictures. 2003. Scream. Dir. Wes Craven. 1996. DVD. Dimension. 1998. Sense and Sensibility. Dir. Ang Lee. 1995. DVD. Columbia Tristar. 1999. Silence of the Lambs. Dir. Jonathan Demme. 1991. MGM. 2004. War of the Worlds. Dir. Steven Spielberg. 2005. Dreamworks. 2005.

8 Theory as Style: Adapting Crash via Baudrillard and Cronenberg Catherine Constable

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the ways in which Ballard’s novel Crash (1993) is taken up and transformed through its adaptation into philosophy and film: Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1994) and David Cronenberg’s Crash (Canada, 1996) respectively.1 The chapter focuses on the source text and its adaptations with a view to outlining the diverse modalities of theorising that are to be found across these different mediums and forms: the written word of literature and philosophy, and the verbal/visual/aural multi-track of film. This involves drawing on a methodology established in my previous work, (Constable, 2005, 2009) in order to focus on the vital conceptual role played by the figurative elements across the different texts. The chapter is structured around three close textual readings: Crash and its two adaptations, which explore the links between style, figuration and theorising. The starting point for this chapter is that literary and filmic texts are capable of presenting complex symbolic and conceptual figures. Work on medium specificity within both adaptation theory and FilmPhilosophy often falls into the promulgation of unhelpful binarisms, pitting the conceptual abstraction of the written word against the perceptual, kinetic power of images (Constable, 2009, pp.41–6, 157–63). My methodology of focusing on the figural involves an awareness of the differences between texts – their specific verbal, visual and aural modes of signification – as well as offering the means of comparing their conceptual worlds and lines of argument. This balance of contrast and comparison undermines the oppositional logic that simply asserts films cannot do philosophy, while also providing the means of thinking through the ways in which different modes of theorising can be presented by multiple types of texts. 135

136


Ballard’s Crash The first person narrator of Crash is named James Ballard thereby fusing both author and character. In the book, James is a producer of adverts whose open marriage to Catherine involves the pair indulging in a series of unsatisfactory sexual encounters. After a head-on collision that kills the other driver, James begins an affair with Helen (the driver’s wife) and they meet Vaughn, who is interested in the details of the crash and their injuries. Vaughn encourages them to think about crashes as an erotic fusion of technology and the body, introducing them to a circle of like-minded people: some, like Gabrielle, have sustained severe injuries from crashes, and others, such as the stunt driver Seagrave, are involved in recreating past crashes. Vaughn is plotting ‘the ultimate spectacle: where he will crash into Elizabeth Taylor’s limousine, destroying them both in a fireball apotheosis’ (Sinclair, 1999, p.43). James and Catherine become obsessed with Vaughn. Catherine’s sexual encounter with Vaughn ends in her being badly beaten, while James’ gold-tinted, homoerotic encounter is followed by Vaughn attempting to kill him, the crash being the climactic erotic fusion of their bodies and technology. Vaughn kills himself in the attempt to stage the ultimate crash with Elizabeth Taylor, leaving James planning the erotic spectacle of his own death/crash. Iain Sinclair reads Ballard’s style as visceral, the metaphors and ‘image clusters’ are said to be drawn from ‘a palette that is lurid and excited’ (1999, p.43). This unusual analysis of the novel’s style is formulated by opposing it to the film: ‘Cronenberg … leaving behind the venereal smears, the hungry wounds and the bad light, strips Ballard’s text of all its faecal mess’ (p.105). However, the example of ‘post-traumatic dribble’ (p.105) provided by Sinclair hardly sustains his reading of the novel as luridly visceral: ‘I sat there, dressed in another man’s blood while the urine of his young widow formed rainbows around my rescuers’ feet’ (Ballard, 1993, p.23 quoted in Sinclair, 1999, p.105). Contrary to Sinclair’s analysis, the narrator’s description uses figurative language in order to contain and reframe visceral elements as part of a controlled pattern – dressed rather than splattered with blood. The metaphor of urine as rainbows is one of a series of figures in which excreted bodily fluids are presented as objects of beauty. Elsewhere in the novel drops of blood shine ‘like liquid rubies’ in a pool of vomit (Ballard, 1993, p.18) and semen glimmers in ‘opalescent drops’ (p.146). The novel’s parade of broken, battered and scarred flesh

Theory as Style: Adapting Crash

137

completely avoids the language of disintegration and decay. The flies that accumulate around dead bodies only occur in James’ hallucination of Vaughn’s death and are the result of an acid trip gone bad (pp.156–7). The construction of the crash as an erotic fusion of flesh and technology that brings about ‘the rebirth of the traffic-slain dead’ (p.155) is absolutely reliant on the positioning of the mortal, decaying, rotting body as unimaginable – the flipside of a hallucination. The authors of both adaptations note Ballard’s use of technical medical language (Baudrillard, 1994, pp.115–16; Sinclair, 1999, p.17). This is evident in the narrator’s description of his first encounter with a prostitute in the airport car-park. As she brought my penis to life I looked down at her strong back, at the junction between the contours of her shoulders demarked by the straps of her brassière and the elaborately decorated instrument panel of this American car, between her thick buttock in my left hand and the pastel-shaded binnacles of the clock and speedometer. Encouraged by all these hooded dials, my left ring finger moved towards her anus. (Ballard, 1993, p.52) The sexual encounter is marked by the use of medical language: buttocks, anus. The precise description of the car parallels it with the female body: its ‘hooded dials’ like the labia majora over the clitoris. The imagery is used again: ‘the sexual act … took place in the hooded grottoes of these luminescent dials, moderated by the surging needle of the speedometer’ (Ballard, 1993, p.111, quoted in Baudrillard, 1994, p.115). In the second case, the technologised female body is accompanied by its male counterpart – the phallic speedometer. The repetition also endows the dials with a cyclical temporality – they both pre-empt and reflect back the sex acts that take place in the cars. Vaughn’s photographs of crash victims fully realise the figurative parallels between sexed bodies and different elements of the car, marking the climactic fusion of flesh and metal (1993, pp. 78–80, 85, 104–5). The descriptions of the photographs are also intermingled with James’ musings about the lives of their subjects before (and after) the crashes. I could imagine [this young woman] sitting in the car of some middle-aged welfare officer, unaware of the conjunction formed by their own genitalia and the stylized instrument panel, a euclid [sic] of eroticism and fantasy that would be revealed for the first time within

138


the car-crash, a fierce marriage pivoting on the fleshy points of her knees and pubis. (1993, p.79) In this daydream the fusion of flesh and metal is ‘a fierce marriage’ whose emotional intensity and commanding fidelity contrasts with the ennui of serial monogamy. The complex figuration sets up a series of triangles: the genitalia of the bored lovers in the front seats and the instrument panel, the latter reconfigured as the apex of new eroticism through its conjunction with the second triangle formed by the woman’s own knees and pubis. The precise geometry pivots on the third term provided by the instrument panel, playing out a shift from heterosexuality to an alternative sexuality that takes the form of a ‘stylized masturbatory rite’ (1993, p.79). The highly figurative first person narration allows for a constant movement between description and compromised moments of commentary in which James overtly theorises about the logic of the perverse possibilities instantiated by the car-crash. The crash breaks down traditional binaries: human/technological, flesh/metal, corporeal/fictional. ‘[Vaughn’s] photographs of sexual acts, … conjunctions between elbow and chromium window-sill, vulva and instrument binnacle, summed up the possibilities of a new logic created by these multiplying artefacts’ (1993, p.85). The crash also offers the young woman a perverse masturbatory space beyond the boring binarism of the heterosexual encounter (p.79). Importantly, the analysis of the logic builds on the scrupulous and careful depiction of the triangular geometry wrought by the apex of the steering column and the junctions created by the photograph that collapse differentials (pp.79, 81). Thus, the complex figuration creates and sustains the possibilities that are analysed in the more overtly philosophical moments. While the novel uses high levels of figuration to sustain its central conceit – the car-crash as a site of eroticism – it also draws on the palimpsests of stories available from the media coverage of celebrity car crashes: from James Dean and Jayne Mansfield to Albert Camus (1993, pp.17, 105–6, etc.). As a producer of adverts, James is fully aware of the multiple photographic, filmic and televisual contexts that turn the car into an image/icon/fiction. This is shown when he borrows an American convertible from the studio rental company. As I moved in the evening traffic along Western Avenue, I thought of being killed within this huge accumulation of fictions, finding my body marked with the imprint of a hundred television crime serials, the signatures of forgotten dramas which … would leave their last credit lines in my skin. (1993, p.50)


139

The metaphor of the wounds caused by the crash as the final credits of forgotten serials is just one of a series of complex figures in which wounding is presented as part of a sign system: from Helen’s scars as ‘palmlines’ inviting a construction of her biography, to Vaughn’s scars that form ‘the templates of a caress imprinted years earlier’ (1993, pp.38, 115). The wounds/inscriptions exhibit a doubled temporality, acting as both a reconfiguration of the past and templates for the caresses yet to come (pp.115–16, 121). The presentation of the car across Crash picks up on its status as ‘an accumulation of fictions’ (1993, p.50) from television programmes, films and media coverage to advertising. The erotics of the car’s hooded dials takes up the ubiquitous parallel between the glamorous model and the shining, reflective surface of the car bonnet that she is typically draped across, simply making it more technologically precise and sexually explicit. For Baudrillard, Crash is exemplary science fiction because it is ‘paroxystic, extrapolating a detail, a characteristic feature and, by rigorous logic, revealing its eccentricity or extreme effects’ (1997, p. 123 quoted in Coulter, 2009, p.3). In this case, the ubiquitous eroticisation of the car in adverts, Hollywood cinema and the media is pursued to the nth degree. While, for Baudrillard, the playing out of this logic in its most extreme form means that the novel does not offer moral condemnation or critical evaluation (1991, p. 119), Sobchack argues that the nihilistic ending provides the means to evaluate the whole: ‘Crash is rigorously about the human body abstracted, objectified, and literalized as techno-body – and Ballard’s vision sees this techno-body as driving us … to a dead end’ ( p.328). The critical dissension about how to read Crash is largely the result of its style, specifically the distinctive combination of complex figuration and precise technical language. For Baudrillard, the technical language both encapsulates and demonstrates the logical equivalence of the objectified terms: technology and the human body. By contrast Sobchack asserts that Ballard’s novel is ‘cautionary and his prose … technical … [exhibiting] unflinching – if fascinated – disgust … for the world he ironically anatomizes’ (1991, p.327). In this analysis, the technicality of the prose constitutes a form of critical distance, opening up a space of negative evaluation whereby the work becomes a cautionary and ironic tale. The problem with Sobchack’s analysis is that Ballard’s precise, formal language is completely at the service of an unreliable first person narrator. The novel carefully constructs a single and singular perspective from which dissenting voices are entirely absent. The pathology of James’ perspective can be inferred from the use of psychoanalytic

140


terms throughout the novel. After their first minor collision, Catherine vomits over the car seat and James reads the bloodstained discharge as ‘the essence of the erotic delirium of the car-crash’. Importantly, the erotics are essentially narcissistic: ‘In this magic pool … I saw my own reflection, a mirror of blood, semen and vomit’ (1993, p. 18). The other central protagonists provide screens for James’ fantasies: his erotic reveries are sustained by Vaughn’s photographs, while Catherine is paralleled with the developing film in Vaughn’s camera (p.122). The absolute egocentrism of the narcissistic perspective is clearly seen in James’ eye-witness account of the sexual encounter between Catherine and Vaughn at the car wash. It begins with his noting ‘Vaughn was holding in his cupped hand my wife’s right breast’ (1993, p.123). The use of the term ‘wife’ coupled with the possessive pronoun ironically foregrounds the relation between the couple at the moment of adultery, forming a stark contrast to the impersonal terms in which Catherine is described later. James fails to intervene when she is badly beaten and his description of Vaughn’s indifference: ‘Already he had lost interest in the whimpering young woman’ is a chilling reflection of his own (p.126). This pathological indifference to his wife’s suffering is later linked to the possibility of schizoid psychosis: ‘Increasingly I was convinced that Vaughn was a projection of my own fantasies and obsessions, and that in some way I had let him down’ (p. 168). The use of psychoanalytic scenarios and terms across the novel, including narcissism, projection, and infantile sexuality (1993: pp. 29–30, 40, 46–7) invite the reader to construct their own psychological evaluation of the protagonist. Importantly, the space of evaluation is not created through the use of medical or technological language. The technical writing presents and constructs James’ singular perspective in carefully neutral terms. Instead, a specific theoretical discourse, psychoanalysis, allows the reader to mobilise its terms to construct their own evaluation of the central protagonist. Thus Sobchack’s conception of the novel’s ‘unflinching … disgust’ (1991, p.327) needs to be relocated as a readerresponse to the specific psychoanalytic discourses that can be mobilised to make this evaluation. The issues of evaluation and critical distance re-emerge in the discussions of both adaptations.

Baudrillard’s Crash The two authors of science fiction repeatedly referenced in Simulacra and Simulation are Philip K Dick and James Ballard. They are discussed in a general chapter on science fiction, which occurs after the chapter


141

on Crash. Numerous critics have argued that Baudrillard’s writing on the postmodern can be regarded as a form of science fiction (Butler, 2003; Kellner, 2006). Interestingly, the debate over the aesthetic achievement of the writing style is typically linked to the philosophical evaluation of the key lines of argument. Baudrillard’s postmodern is created through the precession of the image, turning the real into a copy of the image, and thus marking the end of reality and the beginning of the hyperreal. For Denzin, ‘Baudrillard shares a fate with other male science fiction writers. The visual effects are terrific but the narrative doesn’t work. In becoming what he describes, he ceases to challenge the real’ (1991, p.34). The issue at stake is clearly retaining an unproblematic conception of reality that theory could/should challenge. By contrast, Hayles praises Baudrillard for being ‘as skilled a fiction writer as Ballard, Dick, or [Stanislaw] Lem. More than describe the implosion into simulation, his works enact it’ (p.323, my italics). This sense of Baudrillard’s writing as demonstration rather than description is crucial to evaluating the philosophical work done by the style. Rereading Simulacra and Simulation after Ballard’s Crash provides a new perspective on a number of Baudrillard’s key figures and lines of argument. Vaughn’s gallery of celebrity car-crash victims: Dean, Mansfield, Kennedy and Camus (1993, p.105), is reformed in a new line-up: Dean, Monroe and the Kennedys, all of whom are said to belong to an era prior to simulation in which death was possible (1994, pp. 23–4). The definition of the hyperreal as a space in which everything is always already replicated means that doubling no longer has its traditional connotation of death. Instead people ‘are already purged of their death and better than when they were alive; more cheerful, more authentic … like the faces in funeral homes’ (p.11). This comparison picks up James’ description of the passengers on the airport bus who ‘resembled rows of the dead looking down at us from the galleries of a columbarium’ (Ballard, 1993, p. 117; quoted in Baudrillard, 1994, p.116). While, strictly speaking, the hyperreal is beyond death because that is just another simulation, it is repeatedly characterised as a deathly space (1994, pp. 2, 5, 7, 9, 11, 19, etc.). Crash clearly constructs a vision of the car as a privileged intersection point of television fictions, film images and adverts. The mediamanufactured, image-laden object is beyond criteria such as function. Thus Vaughn delights in the ‘body contours of American saloons and European sports cars, with their subordination of function to gesture’ (1993, p.130). Baudrillard explicitly traces the link between the rise of the image and the end of use value (1994, pp. 22–3). The precession of

142


the image also takes up the presentation of the doubled temporality associated with cars and wounds across Ballard’s novel. James’ reaction to having a serious car-crash references the images that structure his emotional response to the event: ‘After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident’ (1993, p.35). Watching such propaganda James felt ‘a vague sense of unease that the gruesome climax of my life was being rehearsed years in advance’ (p. 35). Baudrillard’s analysis of the media anticipating and circumscribing key events follows the same logic: This is how all the holdups [sic] … are now in some sense simulation holdups [sic] in that they are already inscribed in the decoding and orchestration rituals of the media, anticipated in their presentation and their possible consequences. (1994, p.21) Baudrillard explicitly draws on material from Ballard’s introduction in his chapter on science fiction. For Ballard, mass-merchandising and advertising have fundamentally shifted the balance between fiction and reality in favour of the former. Thus the writer no longer has ‘to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality’ (1993, p.8). As the external world has become unreal, the real is relocated within the internal – the realm of fantasy and the imagination. Baudrillard borrows Ballard’s line of argument, arguing that the disappearance of reality holds open two different roles for science fiction. It can either offer a reinvention of the real, or play out the hyperreal destruction of reality and fiction. Importantly, for Baudrillard, the first strategy is exhibited by the short stories of Philip K Dick, while the second is enacted by Crash (1994, pp.124–5). This reading of the novel clearly goes against Ballard’s understanding of his own work. For Baudrillard, Ballard does not reinvent a reality (however subjective) instead he is heralded as the first writer of the hyperreal. Baudrillard’s celebration of Crash as both hyperreal in its absolute blending of fiction and reality and ‘hyperfunctional’ – beyond ‘the old (mechanical and mechanistic) couple function/dysfunction’ (1994, p.125) has been widely criticised (Hayles, 1991; Sobchack, 1991; etc.). This is because his reading goes against Ballard’s stated aims, resulting in its being dismissed as ‘a serious misreading … a shameless distortion of Crash’s themes’ (Ruddick, 1992, p.356). However, it is worth noting that Baudrillard’s analysis hammers through the inexorable logic he attributes to the novel. Thus the destruction of the binary, mechanical car versus natural body, also undermines the opposition between


143

function/dysfunction that formed the basis of the moral and ‘critical judgment … of the old world’, reconstructing Crash as an exemplary instance of ‘hypercriticism’ (1994, p.119). Importantly, the contention that Baudrillard uses the novel to illustrate pre-existing theoretical concepts (Sobchack, 1991, p.327; Ruddick, 1992, p.357) is unconvincing as many of these concepts have clearly been formulated/reformulated through his engagement with Crash. Baudrillard comments that Ballard’s presentation of the car-crash moves it from the margins: ‘the residual bricolage of the death drive for the new leisure classes’ to the centre: ‘the Accident is everywhere, the elementary, irreversible figure’ (1994, p.113). The substitution of ‘accident’ for Ballard’s ‘car-crash’ foregrounds the logical reversal underpinning the move: ‘It is the Accident that gives form to life, it is … the insane, that is the sex of life’ (p.113). Placed at the centre, the incidental Accident ceases to be the exception and becomes the rule, instigating ‘a new mode of nonperverse [sic] pleasure’ (p.113). This formulation of the argument emphasises reversibility – a key Baudrillardian strategy. Elsewhere, Baudrillard traces the ways in which Ballard’s technical, nonerotic language destroys key binaries (pp.115–16). The different forms of argument intersect to construct the crash as a new form of eroticism. Baudrillard’s analysis of wounding picks up on Ballard’s repeated presentation of the scar as a sign system, adding anthropological references to ‘savage’ practices of tattooing, torture and initiation (1994, p. 115). Here the doubled temporality of Vaughn’s scars and wounds is reconfigured through the juxtaposition of modern technology and age-old savagery. ‘Each mark, each trace, each scar left on the body is like an artificial invagination, like the scarifications of savages’ (p. 114). Importantly, Baudrillard presents this analysis of wounding as a riposte to Lacan: ‘sex, itself, is nothing but the inscription of a privileged signifier [the phallus] and some secondary marks – nothing next to the exchange of all the signs and wounds of which the body is capable’ (p.115). Baudrillard offers an unusual critique of Lacan in that the inscription of the phallic signifier curtails the potentially infinite play of signs/wounds across the body. Thus the phallus becomes the signifier of one limited mode of eroticism. Baudrillard’s conception of new ‘sexuality without precedent’ (1994, p.112) is analysed by Hayles who links it to the sexual encounter between James and Gabrielle (1991, p.322). While Baudrillard does not use this example, his description of the scar as an ‘artificial invagination’ draws on imagery from this episode. In the novel, the scar in Gabrielle’s leg is described as a ‘depraved orifice, the invagination of a sexual organ

144


still in the embryonic stages of its evolution’ (1993, p. 136). The sexual encounter demonstrates the erotic failure of the ‘nominal junction points of the sexual act’ (p.136), it is the exploration of wounds, inscriptions of technology in flesh, that lead to orgasm (p.137). Importantly both Hayles and Ruddick argue that Baudrillard’s rejection of psychology results in his misreading of Crash. Baudrillard’s assertion that the novel’s diegetic world has no ‘affect, … no psychology, no flux or desire, no libido or death drive’ is read as a rejection of Freud (1994, p.112). Hayles argues that James’ and Gabrielle’s excitement at their new-found sexuality shows desire ‘reconfigured and intensified’ (1991, p.322). Ruddick asserts that Baudrillard’s failure to do justice the novel’s construction of Freudian unconscious depths is the result of its subsumption to the concept of the hyperreal as pure surface (1992, pp.358–9). However, it is worth noting that Baudrillard’s reading re-frames the novel as an anti-Lacanian statement by taking up the repeated presentation of wounding as inscription. Thus the potentially infinite multiplicity of Gabrielle’s ‘abstract vents’ (1993, p.137) fundamentally disrupts a Lacanian model of desire, which rests on privileged moments of splitting/ castration. Importantly, Baudrillard’s critique also undercuts the psychoanalytic discourses that provided the reader with the means to formulate their own evaluation of James’ mental state. Thus Baudrillard’s reading is entirely consistent – the re-contextualisation of the novel as a critique of Lacan underpins its reconstruction as non-evaluative hypercriticism. Baudrillard’s depiction of the hyperreal both builds on and alters Ballard’s description of traffic. Crash offers a series of key moments of silence and stillness. My glimpse of an unmoving world, of the thousands of drivers sitting passively in their cars on the motorway embankments along the horizon, seemed to be a unique vision of this machine landscape, an invitation to explore the viaducts of our minds. (1993, p.46) While Ballard focuses on the stasis of the traffic jam, for Baudrillard the car plays a crucial role in the formation of ‘incessant figures of circulation’, ‘the corporeal layer of traffic and flows’ (1994, pp.113, 117). For Ballard, the traffic jam is paradoxical: ‘the enormous energy of the twentieth century … was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause’ (1993, p.117). While Baudrillard uses this quotation it forms part of ‘the incessant figures of traffic’ part of a recurrence and a reworking that emphasises movement (1994, pp.116, 118, my italics). This imagery is taken up and developed further in America (Baudrillard, 1988, pp.50–5, 125).


145

While Baudrillard takes up Ballard to create different figures of traffic, Ballard’s writing impacts on Baudrillard’s concepts, giving them a specific inflection. For Ballard, static traffic, such as the jam or crash site, creates moments of privileged insight, which are conveyed through the use of religious language. Baudrillard ends his reading of Crash quoting a section in which the participants at a crash site begin to disperse: This pervasive sexuality filled the air, as if we were members of a congregation leaving after a sermon urging us to celebrate our sexualities with friends and strangers, and were driving into the night to imitate the bloody eucharist [sic] we had observed with the most unlikely partners. (1993, p.121, quoted in Baudrillard, 1994, p. 119) It is here that Ballard’s conception of the crash as a form of ritual that brings people together impacts on Baudrillard’s depiction of the hyperreal, creating a vision of ‘the universe of simulation … traversed by an intense force of initiation’ (1994, p.119) that is quite unlike its customary flatness and lack of affect. Tracing the doubled impact of Ballard’s writing on Baudrillard’s work is important because it undercuts attempts to draw clear lines between theorising and fiction and suggestions that the former simply imposes on the latter. Both are fundamentally interlinked through the role of figuration. Simulacra and Simulation plays out a series of scenarios in which the hyperreal unfolds, always slightly differently, taking up Ballard to construct at least two of the main story lines. In what is, unfortunately, a standard critical response to this writing style, Sobchack argues that Baudrillard’s work is ‘faux critical’, contrasting his ‘celebratory’, ‘impassioned’ and ‘expansive’ prose with Ballard’s ironic distance (1991, pp.327–8). However, this model of critical distance, with its implicit equation of lack of emotion and objectivity, is precisely what Baudrillard’s writing is designed to undermine. The overtly fictive construction and reconstruction of the hyperreal is a demonstration of the impossibility of ‘objective’ reality or critique. In later work Baudrillard argues that the absence of the real forces a rethinking of the role of theorising itself. Theory-fiction is not descriptive but demonstrative, creating the very figures/concepts that organise the subject’s day-to-day experience (de Boer, 2005).

Cronenberg’s Crash The media furore surrounding Cronenberg’s Crash has had a considerable effect on the critical writing on the film (Barker, Arthurs and

146


Harindranath, 2001, p. 12). The largely negative reception began with Alexander Walker’s review in the London Evening Standard, which carried the editorial headline: ‘A movie beyond the bounds of depravity’ (1996). Walker criticised the film for containing ‘some of the most perverted acts and theories of sexual deviance [he had] … ever seen propagated in main-line cinema’ (1996). Barker, Arthurs and Harindranath note that two key words: ‘and theories’, disappear entirely from the numerous citations of this line in the subsequent frenzy of media debates concerning the film’s sex scenes and alleged violence (2001, p. 13). It is unfortunate that the philosophical content of Crash has been eradicated by the context in which it is usually discussed. Thinking through the film as an adaptation is useful because familiarity with the novel completely circumvents the media-generated ‘shocked and horrified’ response to the sexual content of the film. While Sinclair does this, his book on Crash utilises highly problematic conceptual oppositions for thinking about adaptation: original/copy, substantial written word/insubstantial image, in order to demonstrate the lesser status of the film (1999, p.19). Defined as lifeless, dead and flat, key characters become ghostly simulations of the stars of classical Hollywood (pp.59, 121). Sinclair offers a series of visceral metaphors for Ballard’s prose (pp. 11, 43) in order to argue that the adaptation eviscerates and neutralises the original, depoliticising the satire and making ‘the pornography safe and elegant’ (p.121). In order to chart the changes to the novel more positively it is necessary to begin by thinking through the conceptual implications of the filmic figures and the ways these are used to construct particular lines of argument across the text. The film begins with Catherine having a sexual encounter in an aeroplane hanger. She leans over the smooth, curved, metallic surface of the plane, cupping her right breast and pressing its smooth curves onto the metal. The visual parallel between woman and machine is made obvious with the arrival of an un-named mechanic who proceeds to service her from behind. As Catherine leans forward, her face is reflected in the light, metallic surface of the plane. She licks her mirror image and later rests her head on her reflection. These moments of narcissistic eroticism also reverse the patterns of resemblance in the scene in that the plane now mirrors Catherine. Unlike the novel where narcissism is a form of subjective projection that requires an object/screen, the film’s presentation of narcissistic reversibility shows the equivalence of the erotic objects. This is the film’s closest approximation to the equation of the model with the surface of the car in advertising, but here the plane displaces the car.


147

The impersonal nature of the first sexual encounter is rhymed with James’ interrupted moment of cunnilingus with an unidentified script girl. Catherine and James later meet on the balcony of their flat, discussing their unsatisfactory sexual liaisons. She stands at the balcony hiking up her skirts to reveal her bare bottom and he responds to her invitation. Sinclair rightly notes that Catherine’s stance at the balcony, looking out with her bottom bared to the gaze of the spectator, resembles the postures of models in a number of Helmut Newton’s photographs (1999, pp.52–4). Deborah Unger is the same ectomorphic body type, her tall slenderness conforming to late twentieth century standards of female beauty. The pose, looking out over the twisting curves of the freeway, conveys both erotic availability and indifference. This doubleness is also conveyed by her voice: her lines are delivered in breathy, Monroe-esque tones conveying sexual availability and desire, while the mono-tonal inflection indicates a lack of emotion. Importantly, Catherine’s construction as a paradoxical erotic object makes it impossible to know what she really wants. Her beauty and sexual availability provide a context in which James’ search for erotic fulfilment elsewhere seems perverse. The trio of sex acts at the beginning of the film are marked by anticlimax and indifference. The participants do not face each other, indicating their lack of emotional investment. The crash that brings James and Helen together changes their bodily relation to technology and marks the beginning of a compulsive, convulsive eroticism. Having gazed at the dead body that has crashed through his windshield, James looks out of his car slightly to the right towards Helen. There is a cut to a POV shot of Helen who tugs at her seatbelt, desperately trying to remove it. The jerking action pulls down the lapel of her black jacket, revealing her bare breast. There is a cut back to the medium shot of James who is staring intently at Helen. The eroticism of the crash is conveyed through the combination of two uncontrollable responses to trauma: Helen’s convulsive movement and James’ unblinking stare. The film therefore presents the characters’ erotic choices as the result of a particular pathology, psychological responses to the traumatic event of the crash. The next shot is a long take of James’ leg in traction, the camera travels up the limb, lingering on the multiple silver steel callipers that surround and interpenetrate it. The lower leg wounds are raw and the steel pins appear to be slicing into the flesh. However, those further up the thigh have started to heal, the skin forming fleshy mounds that surround the protruding steel, which looks as if it had grown out of

148


the leg. Importantly, the visual figure of metal sprouting from flesh undercuts the binaries of technological versus human. The novel and both adaptations set out this conceptual move in different ways. Ballard offers complex figures that form the basis of the narrator’s philosophical commentary, Baudrillard traces two lines of logic: reversibility and the implosion of binaries, while Cronenberg offers a series of filmic figures from the narcissistic reversibility of woman as plane to the organics of medical technology. Both this scene and the next begin with the medium close-up of James’ leg, identifying and defining the character through his injuries and relation to technology, rather than via his face, thoughts or feelings. If Catherine’s paradoxical construction as ideal object is crucial to keeping the audience at a distance, it is James’ presentation as a vehicle for technological interpenetration/infiltration that constructs him as a key symbol rather than a character with whom to identify. This distancing effect is compounded by the redistribution of key lines of explanation from the novel, which are given to Vaughn rather than James. Thus building up an understanding of the film’s diegetic world requires a minimal and shifting alignment with James and Vaughn, short-circuiting the possibility of straightforward identification. James’ first sexual encounter with Helen takes place in his new car, which is identical to the one involved in the crash. Their encounter appears based on shared a sensibility concerning traffic, the lengthy initial kiss and face to face positioning suggesting emotional closeness. However, this is undermined by the cool colour palette that links Helen to the car: the maroon of her suit matches the exterior, while her purple satin underwear tones perfectly with the grey upholstery. The sex act is short, both participants scrabbling in discomfort, echoing Helen’s earlier convulsive gesture. The camera is initially placed in line with the left side of the windshield, providing a two-shot of the pair as they kiss, it then mimics the action of someone looking in while walking around the car, providing views through the front and rear passenger windows. Vaughn’s photos of Helen and James, which are seen later, show the view from the front passenger window, retrospectively making the viewer complicit with his particular form of voyeurism. The suggestion of closeness in the first encounter is further undermined by the second. James is positioned behind Helen in the centre of the back seat. She is facing forwards, arms outstretched, her posture setting up a series of balanced geometric shapes: the ovals of her purple bra, the square lines of the corners of the grey front seats and smaller rectangles of the headrests. The film utilises materials: shape, texture


149

and colour, to parallel the woman and the car presumably because the novel’s figurative linking of anatomical and technological shapes was too explicit. Moreover, the car’s dull upholstery absorbs rather than reflecting light, marking a key shift from the novel’s emphasis on the cars’ manifold, reflective, eroticised surfaces. Importantly, the film’s use of light-absorbing textures and unflattering, blue-toned colour palette undercuts the imagery of car advertising, rendering the car a cold space for the endless repetition of compulsive sex acts. The film can therefore be seen to offer a different logical strategy from the novel, which plays out the imagery of car advertising to the nth degree. Initially displaced by the plane, the car is only presented as a shiny, inviting, tactile surface in two scenes. The first is Vaughn’s introduction to the reconstruction of the James Dean crash in which he drapes himself over the body of the Porsche 550 Spyder race car. The scene works to undercut advertising norms: Vaughn is dressed in bulky blue overalls and his scarred, pockmarked face contrasts with the smooth surface of the car. The second is James and Gabrielle’s visit to the Mercedes showroom. Gabrielle’s leather and steel callipers set off her fishnet-encased, scarred legs displacing the soft-top sports car as the ultimate emblem of eroticised technology. The film’s repeated undercutting and displacement of the norms of advertising links to its downplaying of the role of photographic and televisual images. In Ballard’s novel, Vaughn’s photographs fully realise the parallel between the human and the machinic set up by the linguistic figures. Both Ballard and Baudrillard privilege the image, its precessional logic breaking down key binaries. However, in the film, Vaughn’s photographs and Helen’s videotapes of accidents display a different type of logic. The sheer volume of photographs, which are only swiftly glimpsed, coupled with Helen’s acute discomfort when her well-worn videotape breaks down suggest both characters are locked into patterns of compulsive repetition. Their use of images is thus a symptom of their status as crash victims, an effect of trauma rather than a cause. The carwash scene picks up on the presentation of James at the first crash, providing another context for his unblinking, traumatised stare. The parallels between Catherine and the car are clear: she smoothly pulls up her top, revealing her breast to Vaughn, as the automatic roof glides up and over the car. James is shown in profile in the driver’s seat, staring ahead and slightly to the right, precisely replicating his position from the first crash. While he is seen to adjust the rear-view mirror to view the action in the back, the scene contains no shots that precisely replicate his view of the sexual encounter/assault. Catherine stares as

150


Vaughn’s hand fastens around her throat, squeezing tightly. There is a cut to an exterior shot of the beaters thudding against the back window of the car, Vaughn’s attack precisely coinciding with the machine’s motion. While Ballard’s novel also parallels Catherine with the car in this scene, the comparison is based on her cleanliness (1993, pp. 89, 125–6), rather than her presentation as an object of violence. As Catherine wrestles Vaughn, there is a cut to a close-up of her foot, falling forwards and pushing the armrest into the front seat of the car. This is followed by a medium close-up of James, staring and looking downwards to the left. The intruding foot disrupts the fixity of his gaze, his start showing his dislocation from the events unfolding in such close proximity. By not showing the relay of the gaze, the film suggests James’ dislocation is the result of his taking up the driving position, his physicality reworked by the requirements of the car. Catherine is manoeuvred into a series of ever more acutely uncomfortable positions, her neck and leg forced into odd postures. During this time there are two more medium close-ups of James. In the first, the sounds of his arousal chime with the pitch of the noises made by the machine cleaning the car, the splatter of soap across the window suggesting his successful ejaculation. The second occurs after Catherine is clearly in acute discomfort and he continues to stare straight ahead. There is a cut to a close-up of her left hand covered in mucus and blood as she clutches the top corner of the driver’s seat. The clutching hand with the wedding ring clearly visible is Catherine’s most affective and affecting gesture, its mute appeal contrasting with the typical impassivity of her face. Importantly, the tight framing of the close-up reduces James to the dark, squared edge of his jacket shoulder, marking his assimilation within the geometric aesthetics of the car, and indicating his machinic incapacity to respond to Catherine’s appeal. The highly symbolic presentation of Catherine and James means that the narrative trajectories enacted by these characters take on the force of logical demonstrations. Thus Catherine’s initial status as a glamorous, unknowable, erotic object is demystified through her reduction to an object of violence: a bloody, clutching hand. Her de-glamorisation is evident in the following scene in which she lies flat on her back on her bed, her bruised and discoloured body no longer curved into inviting postures. Thus the systematic demystification reveals the dehumanisation and exploitation that underpins the construction of woman as erotic object. Unlike Catherine who is always equated with technology, James’ trajectory is one of the gradual infiltration of technology: from the first shot of his leg in traction, to his complete assimilation within


151

the geometry of the car. James’ objectification is the result of trauma and is charted as a process of dislocation and dehumanisation. The final scene in which James takes on Vaughn’s role, driving Catherine off the road in a patched up Lincoln, offers an interesting presentation of traffic. Both Ballard and Baudrillard present traffic and the freeway as a location for mass communion albeit of a perverse sort. In contrast, the film repeatedly uses the freeway to emphasise the isolation of the couple. In the early scene on the balcony, the camera travels past Catherine and James, providing a high angle shot of the flowing traffic on the curving freeway, placing them in a suburban side trap. The final aerial shot of the pair copulating on a grass verge contains them within the space at the edge of the road. While for Baudrillard, the accident becomes the centre, reversing its previous formulations, for Cronenberg, the crash remains incidental. In the film, the flowing movement of the freeway is a kind of communal event, which is disrupted by the crash and from which the key protagonists are exiled. Thus Catherine, James and the others symbolise extreme variants of the fusion of technology and the body and the forms of dehumanisation this entails.

Conclusion Ballard’s novel with its complex figures and distinctive fusion of literature and philosophical commentary gives rise to two very different adaptations. If the novel’s use of psychoanalytic discourses allows the reader to begin to construct their own evaluation of James’ perspective, the film’s construction of James as a disengaged and un-engaging protagonist builds its evaluation of the character into the presentation of his bleak diegetic world. The precise technical and medical language of the novel is at the service of the creation of an all-encompassing, singular, pathological perspective. By contrast, Cronenberg’s film uses strategies that create critical distance: presenting characters as symbols, offering a visual anti-aesthetic that displaces the typical presentation of the car as reflective, erotic surface, in order to set out a study of eroticism, technology and de-humanisation. The objectifying distance that is part of the pathology of James’ perspective in the novel, is thereby reworked as a mode of critical distance that reveals the pathology of technology by demonstrating its adverse effects on a particular group of characters. If the filmic adaptation reworks Ballard’s novel as modernist critique, the philosophical adaptation turns it into postmodern theory-fiction. Baudrillard’s adaptation of Crash plays out the fusion of fiction/reality in order to demonstrate the undermining of reality, objectivity and

152


critical distance. While the film presents the flow of traffic as a figure of a communal norm from which the protagonists as crash victims are exiled, thereby also sketching out an ‘objective’ space from which they can be judged; Baudrillard uses the accident as a means of displacing and dispersing any notion of the norm. Importantly, Baudrillard’s rewriting of Ballard’s figure of the traffic jam as a static moment that provides insight (1993, p.46) can be seen as a refusal of the possibility of such contemplative moments. The relentless movement of ‘the incessant figures of traffic’ (1994, p.118) is a denial of the possibility of accessing the truth. Tracing the key changes to the figures of traffic across the adaptations is important because it highlights the link between figuration and theorising. The alteration of the figure creates a distinctive mode of theorising in each case. It is the figure that sustains or undermines the possibility of accessing truth, creating or destroying concomitant moments of critical distance and moral evaluation. Interestingly, in the case of Crash, it is the film adaptation that utilises traditional modalities of theorising: abstraction and critical distance, while the philosophical adaptation enthusiastically celebrates the novel, thereby foregrounding its own status as another story. The film’s cool colour palette, symbolic characters and visual anti-aesthetic sustain its status as a cold, assessing study of dehumanisation. The philosophical writing tumbles headlong into a celebration of the post-human through Baudrillard’s deployment of energetic, vibrant figures of continual movement. Both adaptations use the figural to set up different modes of theorising that engage the viewer/reader in different ways. Understanding the role of figuration and style enables us to begin to grasp the multiform ways in which philosophical, literary and filmic texts can do philosophy.

Note 1. Ballard’s Crash was first published in 1973. He wrote an introduction for the French edition that appeared in 1974. This chapter uses the Flamingo publication (1993), which contains both elements. Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation was first published in French in 1981, this chapter uses the English translation published in 1994.

References Ballard, J., 1993. Crash. London: Flamingo. Barker, M., Arthurs, J. and Harindranath, R., 2001. The Crash Controversy: Censorship Campaigns and Film Reception. London, New York: Wallflower Press.


153

Baudrillard, J., 1988. America. Translated from the French by C. Turner. London and New York: Verso. Baudrillard, J., 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated from the French by S. F. Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Baudrillard, J., 1997. Fragments: Cool Memories III. London and New York: Verso. Butler, A., 2003. ‘Postmodernism and science fiction’. In E. James and F. Mendlesohn, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.137–48. Constable, C., 2005. Thinking in Images: Film theory, Feminist Philosophy and Marlene Dietrich. London: British Film Institute. Constable, C., 2009. Adapting Philosophy: Jean Baudrillard and The Matrix Trilogy. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Coulter, G., 2009. ‘Passings – J. G. Ballard: Philosopher of the Future Present’. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, [Online] 6 (2). Available at: www. ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-6_2/v6-2-passings-ballard.html [Accessed 5 January 2010]. De Boer, J., 2005. ‘The Fatal “Theory-Fiction” of Jean Baudrillard’. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. [Online] 2 (1), Available at: www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_1/deboerpf.htm [Accessed 5 January 2010]. Denzin, N., 1991. Images of Postmodern Society: Social Theory and Contemporary Cinema. London: Sage. Hayles, K., 1991. ‘The Borders of Madness’. Science Fiction Studies. 18 (3), pp.321–3. Kellner, D., 2006. ‘Jean Baudrillard After Modernity: Reflections on a Provocateur and Challenger’. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. [Online] 3 (1), Available at: www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol3_1/kellner.htm [Accessed 3 April 2008]. Ruddick, N., 1992. ‘Ballard/Crash/Baudrillard’. Science Fiction Studies. 19 (3), pp.354–60. Sinclair, I., 1999. Crash. London: British Film Institute. Sobchack, V., 1991. ‘Baudrillard’s Obscenity’. Science Fiction Studies. 18 (3), pp.327–29. Walker, A., 1996. ‘A Move Beyond the Bounds of Depravity’. London Evening Standard. 3 June.

9 The Ghost is the Machine: Media-Philosophy and Materialism Karin Littau

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare asks us to think about how the ‘imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown’ (V. i. 14–15). This line, in a play replete with fairies, asks us to consider the work of the imagination. How are we to imagine the imagination itself? Certainly, the way in which Shakespeare imagined his Oberon – King of the fairies, or his Titania – Queen of the fairies, or Puck, Peasebottom, Cobweb, Moth or Mustardseed, first took material shape on a page, on paper, penned, we presume, in ink. As the play says, ‘the poet’s pen / Turns them [the forms of things unknown] to shapes, and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name’ (V. i. 15–17). With the help of a writing instrument, ‘airy nothing’ is turned into something. What was invisible becomes visible. What was immaterial becomes material. But is the pen just that: an instrument, a tool? Are the instruments we use to make art from the ‘airy nothing’ in our heads just that: tools which serve art? Or, do ‘our writing tools’, as Friedrich Nietzsche suggests in 1882 with reference to the typewriter, ‘also work on our thoughts’ (1981, p.172)? Stylus produces style, literally;1 but more than that. If we follow Nietzsche’s thinking then it is not technologies –stylus, pen, typewriter, etc. – which serve a pre-existing imagination. Rather, technologies produce consequent imaginations, in which case ‘airy nothings’ would be the products of technology. Applied to the context of screen cultures, this would mean that the cinematograph produces that which in Latin literally means bringing to light: the imaginatio. This is the crux of the issue I want to pursue in this chapter, making reference to two modern media: print and film. Let me first frame the question in slightly different terms: are media the technical support systems engineered to carry and encapsulate the mind’s labours? Following Nietzsche’s insight above, the answer is no. For, if this were the case, 154

The Ghost is the Machine: Media-Philosophy & Materialism 155

then the book – one of our oldest storage systems, and certainly the most ubiquitous – would necessarily have to be invisible to us when we read. All we should conceive is what is in the text, and all we should perceive therefore are Shakespeare’s thoughts, irrespective of the materials which have manufactured the words on the page in the first place. This is certainly what the phenomenologist of reading, Georges Poulet, has in mind when he suggests that during reading books ‘must relinquish their existence as real objects’, ‘in order to exist as mental objects’ (1980, p.43). Here, the book only comes into existence as it ‘thinks itself in me’, ‘gives itself a meaning within me’ (ibid., p.47). According to this logic, the technical apparatus of writing is both neutral and transparent. The material object of the book disappears, as if it were an ‘airy nothing’. The same goes for the cinematograph. Once in full few, these days we hide it in a projection box. Out of sight, out of mind. But what are the implications of placing culture over here, and technology over there? Is it desirable, or even possible, to separate tool from art, matter from spirit? Would indifference to materiality not be akin to something like this: ‘language without material inscription, speech without phonation, text without book, film without camera or filmstrip, painting without canvas. In a word, the playing cards without the cards – summarized by only the rules of the game (poker, bridge, or belote)’ (Debray, 1996, p.72). These are the words of Régis Debray, anti-semiologist, self-professed mediologist and advocator of a ‘machinistic’ turn (p.51). Debray’s thinking, like that of his counterpart in Germany, Friedrich A. Kittler, offers a critique of the way in which the Humanities study their objects, namely in humanistic – that is human-oriented – terms. All that seems to matter is what is deep inside: that which the Germans call Geist – spirit, mind, soul. What does not matter is matter. This is because it is on the outside, and therefore separate from Geist; hence also mind over matter. It is no wonder therefore that hermeneutics, which was born with the Geisteswissenschaften in the nineteenth century, has no interest whatsoever in the material, the physical, the corporeal; which is why Kittler has no interest whatsoever in propagating hermeneutics. The imperative ‘understand’ is a priori for hermeneutics. It is all about interpretation and meaning. Similarly, semiotics which is concerned with the world of symbolic representations only rarely touches on the concrete thing itself. Here rules frame signification processes, and systems pre-exist the material; which is why Debray is more interested in the codex than the code (p.73). My point is, following a media-philosophical approach (largely yet to be defined), that art, and indeed culture, are only available to us through

156


media technologies. Media are the hardware of our culture. There would be no culture, were it not for media. There would be no philosophy, had words not been stored on scrolls, and scrolls safely stored in containers. And without print technology, there probably would never have been the genre of the novel (Feather, 1988, pp.57, 150). Therefore, we must explore how media give not just shape to the works of the imagination, but actually body forth imaginations. If art defines our spiritual world, who we are, but is dependent on technological media to transmit our being, it would be wrong-headed to separate the world of spirit from the world of things. As Debray quite rightly says, ‘the spirit of the age is as much in its objects as in its literary works, as much in our hands as in our heads’ (1996, p.75). In short, if art – whether with quill or printer’s ink, painted in colour or with light – is the prosthesis of being on condition of technology, it follows that we cannot prioritise, as Plato did, epist¯ em¯ e over techn¯ e. The switch must be flicked from ‘spiritual Sein to medial Dasein’ (Assmann, 2006, p. 21).2 To flick that switch we must look more closely at the relation between media and the imagination, that is, we must examine the relation between technology and what Marina Warner calls mind, soul, or ‘spirit stuff’ (2006, p.63), and what Kittler dismissively refers to as ‘software’ (1997, pp.147–55). To bring together Warner and Kittler may strike the reader as an unholy alliance. Her writing over the years has produced a distinguished body of works on narratives of transformations, myths and fairy tales; his is about discourse networks, dataprocessing, and machines. She is interested in magic, he in engineering. Her latest book, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century (2006) has a deeply catholic sensibility, with all the richness and colour of the Renaissance artist. His most recent output is about numbers, algorithms, and computer codes (see, for instance, 2006). And yet, despite their differences, they share a sense that media – our principal means by which to give expression to the imagination, through say, story-telling – are material. Both therefore redirect our inquiry into the ontology of the art work: art is not only the stuff of Geist, but also of Materie; even if this Materie – in the case of cinema – is composed of something as immaterial as the lights and shadows which make up the filmic image. Warner’s Phantasmagoria is a work about media history.3 It chronicles an array of media: we are introduced to signs and wonders, as they take shape in air and in swirling clouds, rays of light as well as plays of shadow, or refract on the surface of mirrors. Air, clouds, light, shadows, and mirrors are not the only media she offers for illumination. We also encounter death masks, from the saints in churches to the celebrities in Madame


Tussauds, imprinted in wax in an attempt to preserve the living likeness of the departed. She introduces us to photographs of famous nineteenthcentury mediums whose ectoplasmic discharge during séance, the camera captures as ‘proof of the existence of other states of matter’ (p. 300). We meet zombies and cyborgs envisaged by the new technology of film. Thus, modern media for rendering the operations of fantasy are also scrutinized. These include film’s precursors: the magic lantern and the fantascope – instruments of uncanny illusion which ‘imitat[e] the motion of the spirit within’, and by doing so, ‘cast on to the screen fantastic pictures of the supernatural’ (p.143). Here, ghosts, devils, skeletons and a host of other phantom creatures appear and disappear in eerie spectacles of special effect. The story that unfolds in Phantasmagoria is of the myriad ways in which media, and their transitions in time, have impacted on self, society, and the arts: New technologies for seeing, recording, and picturing have reconfigured the traditional materials from which soul and spirit have been formed by imagination, and so, alongside the constellation of spirit metaphors, I take up the story of ‘haunted media’ […] and follow some of the ways in which modern technologies communicate the imagination’s make-believe, its desires and terrors, and shape them through the latest telecommunications and imaging techniques. (p. 13) Throughout then, the book draws attention to the ways in which media have, paradoxically, given material substance to immaterial spirit and spirit forms; that is, it shows us how matter gives shape to spirit. And, it shows us that media leave marks, produce effects, and crucially also affect. However – and this worth stressing – Warner’s book is not about representations, or Representation with a capital ‘R’, that mode of analysis which – under the impetus of Cultural Studies – has dominated the Humanities since the 1970s. The book is not about the ways in which spirit or spirits are represented in different media. Rather, Phantasmagoria is about the ways in which media store, transmit, and crucially therefore also organise the spirit world. As such there is an inversion at work here, noticeable also in Marshall McLuhan and his diverse legatees in Media Studies. It concerns the assumed priority of the metaphysical over the physical. Like Kittler, Warner refuses to treat the physical merely as the base on top of which culture creates a second representational level. If anything, representations for Warner, just as much as discourses for Kittler, are shaped by material causes.

158


With this in mind, it is instructive to go back to Aristotle, and especially to the Physics. It is here that he outlines four causes, causes which he uses to explain how a thing comes to be a thing. The first cause is material, designating that ‘from which a thing is made’. The second cause concerns form, whether in terms of a specific or generic pattern. The third, which Aristotle calls ‘efficient’, names the ‘devisor of a plan’ – here the artist. And the fourth and final cause, because it asks for the purpose or goal of a thing, refers to the audience (194b23–32). While Literary- and Film Studies have taken into account three of these causes, at different times emphasising one over another, it is the first cause, the very substance from which a thing is produced, which has yet to be fully explored. If we were to do so, this would entail a reorientation of enquiry in the Humanities. It would entail that we do not give priority to the ideational over the material, or meaning over medium; that we do not make contents and form the sole end of critical analysis, but take seriously the physical substance from which the sculptor, painter, writer, or filmmaker causes form to emerge. Phantasmagoria is very much part of this reorientation. To my mind, Warner is a Geistes-Wissenschaftlerin – a spirit-scientist – in the very literal sense, because she brings together Geist (spirit, mind) and Geister (spirits, ghosts and such) with Wissenschaften (knowledge or sciences). She brings together the world of spirits and the material world, the ephemeral and the solid, heaven and earth, sky and ground, or, as she says, ‘spirit and matter’ (2006, p.88). Crucially, it is not spirit alone which shapes matter into forms, as if spirit were the origin of all things; matter too is paid its due. Kittler also is a materialist, but he goes further still. He seeks to exorcise spirit from matter, get rid of the ghost in the machine, as the title of one of his early books makes evident: Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften (1980), literally translated as Exorcism of the Spirit from the Spirit Sciences, but perhaps best rendered in English as Driving-out of the Human from the Human Sciences.4 For all their differences, their shared project is this: by drawing our attention to the dependence of the spirit on its media – its bodies, if you will – both Warner and Kittler’s work is part of a paradigm shift in the Geisteswissenschaften. We cannot, in these fields, so inadequately here called Humanities in English, focus on the works of spirit without the sciences that affect them. A genuine ‘science of mind’, in other words, is equally and necessarily a science of physical and technological forms. It was Thomas Kuhn who famously defined what a paradigm shift entails. In The Structure of Scientific Revolution (1962) he argues that ‘major turning points in scientific development’ have ‘each transformed


the scientific imagination’ and with it ‘the transformation of the world’ (p.6). This he calls a ‘paradigm shift’: a change not only from a particular received way of thinking to another, but a concomitant change in our perception of the world around us. It constitutes a ‘gestalt switch’ (p.150), which brings about a crisis insofar as ‘novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance’ (p.64). It strikes me that what media historians such as Warner and Kittler have chronicled are a number of gestalt switches, each of which affects our Dasein, affects how our being is positioned, where it is situated. To focus therefore on the way in which technology configures and reconfigures our being-in-theworld is to change the very ground of inquiry. The world of Geist (human spirit) cannot be separated from the world of Materie (non-human things). And insofar as media are things, and not separable from spirit, then things re-articulate spirit. In order to flesh this out further I want to bring into the discussion two other persons, also named Thomas: the medieval theologian St. Thomas Aquinas and the late nineteenth-century inventor Thomas Alva Edison – a trinity of ‘Thomism’. In Summa Theologica Aquinas poses an interesting question which can be related to many of the issues just raised. It concerns angels – God’s postal workers, whose task it is to carry messages between heaven and earth, to mediate between him and us. The question is: how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? It is posed in the context of Aquinas’ discussion on the nature of spirit, and its relation to matter. For Aquinas angels are ‘bodies of air’ with ‘neither shape or colour’ (Warner, 2006, p. 63). If this is so, how can we distinguish – say count – angels in space? Or on the head of a pin? After all, only something that has body can be pinpointed in space, becomes distinct – so to speak – through position or extension in space. What the question asks – namely, does physical space matter to non-physical entities? – is very much a metaphysical question. For, to answer the question one would need physical evidence – and this is at best an implausible (although, as we shall see, a far from impossible) task when dealing with non-physical entities such as angels. And yet, whether body, and not flesh (as Augustine had it), or whether clothed in ‘light and radiance’ (Warner, 2006, p. 63) – angels materialise in wax, on paper, canvas, plaster, stone and by a variety of visual means. Whether with quill ink, printer’s ink, or paint, angels are made visible, either directly to our eyes, or as is the case in literature, to the mind’s eye. But, as yet, they do not dance. Angels cannot dance, because they cannot move. Drama and opera can conjure up illusions of ethereality,

160


but the existence that angels have on stage remains ephemeral. Either ethereal and static, or mobile and ephemeral, angels pose an ‘impossible conundrum’: how to capture ephemeral and ‘ethereal materiality’ (Warner, 2006, p. 86)? The answer has to do with recording on the one hand, and with movement on the other; two characteristics which come together in film, and distinguish it from previous storage media such as stone, wax, scroll, canvas, or codex. ‘Pious figuration’, as Debray says in his chapter ‘The Exact Science of Angels’, ‘had the jump on bookish conceptualization (the image gets to things before the idea can)’ (2000, p. 37). Film has the jump on the still image. Vorsprung durch Technik. The answer to this conundrum then also serves as an unexpected answer to Aquinas’ question. The number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin depends on the focal length and speed of the camera lens, or the technical sophistication of the CGI team. In this respect, it is techn¯ e which gives us the knowledge of angels, creating their being. Their ‘spiritual Sein’ is dependent on their ‘medial Dasein’. Thus media add angels to the physical world. Enter: Thomas Alva Edison. Film, first invented by Edison for his kinetoscope, is a technology for animation. It gives angels anima, animates them. Although only one spectator at a time could peer into the kinetosope (because it was in effect a peep-box), many angels could be seen dancing. Film’s crucial importance clearly is its capacity to record movement, and endlessly play it back. Like photography, film can capture a moment; but unlike photography it captures these moments in succession. This was also noticed by the British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, during his first visit to the movies in 1915: My meaning in regard to the impermanence of physical entities may perhaps be made clearer by the use of Bergson’s favourite illustration of the cinematograph. When I first read Bergson’s statement that the mathematician conceives the world after the analogy of a cinematograph, I had never seen a cinematograph, and my first visit to one was determined by the desire to verify Bergson’s statement, which I found to be completely true, at least as far as I am concerned. When, in a picture palace, we see a man rolling down hill, or running away from the police […] we know that there is not really only one man moving, but a succession of photographs, each with a different momentary man. The illusion of persistence arises only through the approach to continuity in the series of momentary men. Now what I wish to suggest is that in this respect the cinema is a better


metaphysician than common sense, physics, or philosophy. […] And what applies to men applies equally to tables and chairs, the sun, moon, and stars. (1953, p. 123, emphasis mine)5 And we may add, it applied to angels too. To come back to Thomas Aquinas from Thomas Edison’s point of view, the answer to ‘How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?’ is many – since even just one angel is not really one but a succession of stills, each with a different momentary angel. Above all then, cinema is kinesis before it is mimesis – movement before copying. But it is not this point alone, which I want to draw out here. The passage is suggestive of another characteristic associated with film: film is a technology which paradoxically makes permanent, because it records, ‘the impermanence of physical entities’ (Russell, ibid.). In this sense it is a time-machine. Film gives immortality to all things ephemeral, the image lives on long after we are dead. Marilyn Monroe’s presence is still felt even in her absence. Film is kinesis, not least because it gives life to dead matter, breathing anima or pneuma – the divine, animating wind – into the still image. And, it allows the dead to dance, and it allows angels to dance. This is how Warner sums up the impact of the new technologies which culminated in the cinema: The inventions of proto-cinema and then of the movies themselves brought about a revolution. Imagining what self-image was like before the family album is very hard, but it is worth repeating that photography, still and moving, has fundamentally altered the grounds of self-knowledge. (2006, p. 185, my emphasis) That media have altered our self-perception, as well as our perception of the world, is evident if we consider the following examples. The first one, given by Warner, concerns two sisters, both mediums, who communicate with the beyond. They called themselves ‘celestial telegraphers’ (Warner, 2006, p. 221), because the spirit that announced himself to them, did this by rapping and tapping from behind walls and underneath floors. It was as if he was communicating with the sisters by ‘telegraphic messaging or Morse code’. As Warner points out, this was ‘cutting edge’ stuff at the time (p. 222). We are talking about 1851, only a few years after Morse had been invented as a transmission code. This then is illustrative of the ways in which spirit experience becomes couched in the terms which actually describe a new technology: the telegraph.

162


The second example also concerns the ways in which technology imprints itself on our perception. Warner makes reference to Aristotle and his ‘comparison of body and soul to wax and the seal that impresses and shapes it’ (2006, p. 296). A similar point is also made in Plato’s Theaetetus, when Socrates asks Theaetetus to imagine the mind as a wax tablet: Let us, then, say that this is the gift of Memory, the mother of the Muses, and that whenever we wish to remember anything we see or hear or think of in our own minds, we hold this wax under the perceptions and thoughts and imprint them upon it, just as we make impressions from seal rings; and whatever is imprinted we remember and know as long as its image lasts, but whatever is rubbed out and has not succeeded in leaving an impression, we have forgotten and do not know. (191d) Amongst other things, this passage alludes to writing as pharmakon (cure or poison) in the Phaedrus: a discussion about the medium of writing, as an aid to memory, or its destroyer, within what was essentially an oral culture based on public debate. But this is not what I want to highlight in the main. The point is that the mind, or soul, is likened to an inscription surface, which as we know developed over the centuries into other media such as the scroll, the codex, and finally the printed book. This is by no means an isolated instance of soul, or spirit, being defined with reference to the media, as is evident also from the next example.6 Around 1900, five years after the first film screenings by the Lumières, there occurred a seemingly unprecedented number of mountaineering accidents, with victims tumbling to their deaths from high mountain ridges. It was said at the time by survivors and others (Rudolf Steiner amongst them) that in the last moments, as the victims fell, they had seen their life unroll in the manner of a time-lapse film. Evidently, film had already made an impact on the imaginary. According to Kittler, this shows that ‘in 1900, the soul suddenly stopped being a memory in the form of wax slates or books, as Plato describes it; rather, it was technically advanced and transformed into a motion picture’ (2010, p.35). In 1851, the soul was clearly informed by another technology for the transmission of data: the telegraph. It is not what is being said about the soul, or the lost souls, in each of these examples that is of primary interest here; it is the analogy drawn that is revealing. For Kittler this demonstrates ‘the historical tendency to employ technical media as models or metaphors for imagining the human or the soul’ (ibid.); for


Warner it shows that media are not just vessels through which spirit and spirits ‘take form in the world’; rather, the interaction between ‘the life of spirit forms’ and their ‘vehicles’ (2006, p. 12) is such that the vehicles quite literally give spirits their form – inspire them. They operate, says Warner, ‘as an extension of contemporary media’ (p. 379). This means that soul and spirit are effects of a given culture’s media forms. What such an argument highlights is that media are more than representational forms. This is the very point where Warner’s and Kittler’s arguments are closest, and closest also to McLuhan. We cannot think outside media because we inhabit them, as fish swim in water (McLuhan, 1969, p. 22). Media immerse and mediate: that is, they immediate. At this juncture we are also back with Nietzsche’s comment about typewriting: namely, that tools have the power to ‘enframe’7 insofar as they work on our thoughts – thoughts which become inseparable from our tools, and as such no longer allow us to think without them, or rather, outside of them. In other words, tools do more than simply serve, and media do more than merely conserve: they are constitutive. ‘Media determine our situation’ is Kittler’s opening gambit in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999, p.xxxix), and nod to McLuhan. According to Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, the book’s translators, Kittler’s claim means that media ‘no doubt also determine, and hence configure, our intellectual operations’ (‘Translators’ Introduction’, in Kittler, 1999, p.xx). To say, however, that media, such as print or film, have shaped our thinking about thinking, and have even shaped our conceptual apparatus, is not the same thing as saying that media can and have significantly shaped and altered our sense perceptions. In other words, there is a difference between conception and perception, between conceiving of media as metaphors and models, and conceiving of media as perceptual manipulators. Thus it remains to be addressed how media affect our experience of the world, that is, how media are perceptual manipulators that alter our being-in-the-world. If media are neither forms of representation nor just metaphors, but perceptual manipulators, this lends further weight to a materialist approach; for we can, in addition to materiality, take into consideration physiology. Again, we may turn to Nietzsche for an answer, albeit not to his remark on the typewriter but his notes ‘Toward the Physiology of Art’ (1888). Here, Nietzsche famously describes art as rapture or intoxication (1967, CM VIII, 3, pp.327–8). The claim plays with Plato’s fears, as articulated through Socrates’ exchange with Ion, that if we allow ourselves to be affected by art – through tears or shudders – we

164


must be out of our senses (Plato, 535d). Nietzsche’s claim was also of course, as Martin Heidegger noticed, directed against Immanuel Kant’s insistence on the pathology of affect (Heidgegger, 1991, pp.107–14). Plato solved the issue by banning poetry from the Republic, Kant via the remedy of disinterestedness. Reason must distance itself from sensation, just as mind must put distance between itself and body. In the Geisteswissenschaften we have lived with cognitive apatheia ever since we forgot that aesthetics once also was aesthesis; ever since appreciation of the formal structures of art rather than its affective powers, as it had been for the ancients, became the norm for aesthetics. The question, which this issue raises in the context of media history, is this: how have media technologies affected our sense experience? What is the relation between media and bodies?8 The links between media and bodies are manifold. We might say that media technologies, which are material, presuppose a physically present body to receive communication (Böhme, 2000, p. 63): the reader or film spectator. Or we might say, following McLuhan, that media and bodies are linked in terms of the interface between them, namely through prosthesis (McLuhan, 1964, p. 15). Alternatively, we could say that media manipulate the senses. In order to make this case it helps to compare the receptions of print around 1800 and that of film around 1900. Consider, for instance, the author and journalist Alexander Innes Shand’s comparison between manuscript and print culture. Of the former he says in 1879, that it was marked by ‘easy-going tranquility’ which the ‘discovery of printing recklessly disturbed’, when ‘nimble fingers’ were busy ‘mechanically translating thought into metal’ (p.240). In the pre-Gutenberg era he insists ‘[t]here was no wear-and-tear of the mental fibres, and, consequently, there were none of those painful brain and nerve diseases that fill our asylums’ now (p.236). It is not incidental that Emma Bovary is a devourer of books and also a neurotic; and that the narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, trapped as she is in a room of print, suffers from nervous exhaustion. Shand’s remark is among countless during this period and stretching back to the eighteenth-century, which see the technology of print as the devil’s invention. As an efficient technology for the production of the written word, it is blamed for bringing too many books to too many readers, too fast; thus bringing about the kinds of extensive or indiscriminate reading practices we now associate with Quixoticism or Bovarysm. The periodical press, educational handbooks, dietetic treatises etc. warned repeatedly about print hampering thinking, enfeebling minds, even the vigour of nations, and about reading-related


illnesses with medical symptoms ranging from constipation, flabby stomachs, eye and brain disorders, to nerve complaints and mental disease.9 The quantitative increase in book production clearly had qualitative cultural effects: overload, in material and sensory terms. Insofar as the speed of production fed the rate of consumption, it is technology which is responsible for the afflictions that modern readers suffered. In short, the impact of technology on physiology became incremental, and readers responded accordingly. What I am describing here is, of course, part and parcel of the experience of modernity, which the sociologist Georg Simmel equates in 1903 with an ‘intensification of nervous stimulation’ (1997, p. 175). This diagnosis also tallies with Nietzsche’s quasi-neurological explanation from 1888 of the modern ‘sensibility’ having become ‘immensely more irritable’, given that the ‘abundance of disparate impressions [is now] greater than ever’ (1968, p.47). The sheer intensity of physical and mental stimulation that an urban, and increasingly technologized, environment induces seemingly turns people into nervous wrecks. Stimuli are responded to, as if by reflex, and it has become impossible to absorb anything but in fragments. We not only lose our capacity to think, but also read in a higgledy-piggledy fashion, fleetingly and without depth. This more or less describes what many a critic during this period thought of the effects of print culture on the reader, among them C. H. Butterworth who has this to say in 1870: ‘books of travel, science, poetry, history, fiction, succeed and overwhelm one another with such alarming rapidity, that the man who stops for a moment to take breath and reflect, is lost’ (p.501, my emphasis). The most striking aspect about this remark, is how uncannily it compares with Siegfried Kracauer’s descriptions of cinematic experience. Thus, when Kracauer writes in 1926 that in the cinema, ‘the stimulations of the senses succeed each other with such rapidity that there is no room left for even the slightest contemplation to squeeze in between them’ (1987, p.94, my emphasis), it is as if one technology replays the characteristics of another. Or, it is as if Kracauer, writing about film, has remediated almost the exact words used by Butterworth about print. In fact, what plagued the health of the nation in the late eighteenthcentury still plagues it in the early twentieth-century. We only need to compare what critics say in 1913 about the ‘habit of “the pictures”’ (Dr Edward Rees) with what is said about the so-called ‘reading addiction’ around 1800 to know that books and films have similar effects. Therefore, whether readers in 1789 are infected by what one critic calls a ‘reading epidemic [Lese-Seuche]’ (Friedrich Burchard Beneken) and what another the same year refers to as ‘novel fever’ (Johann Ludwig Erwald),10

166


or whether more than an entire century later, spectators are affected by a ‘cinema epidemic [Kinoseuche]’ (Adolf Sellmann, 1912) and have been attacked in their thousands by so-called ‘film-fever’ (Max Prels, 1922),11 and are therefore either ‘febrile’ and ‘feeble in self-direction’ as a medical doctor says about films (Rees, 1913), or left with a ‘flabby’ and ‘flaccid’ mind or an ‘enfeebl[ed]’ brain as a literary editor says about print (Austin, 1874, pp.257, 251); in all these cases the addictions, afflictions, and diseases have to do with the impact of a new technology. Perhaps, the art critic and architect Adolf Behne was right in 1926 when he wrote that film is ‘the simple, direct, and legitimate continuation of the book – Edison the new Gutenberg’ (1978, p.162); which would make Kittler wrong, at least insofar as Kittler draws a strict demarcation between circa 1800 and circa 1900, as the oblique between the two dates in the title of his book Discourse Networks 1800/1900 already indicates. Kittler’s cue comes from Michel Foucault, with whom he sees history as marked by ruptures, discontinuities and caesuras. Thus circa 1800, still dominated by Geist and the inner eye could not be more different from circa 1900, an era all about mechanical optics. This is not the place to delve into the complexities of Kittler’s arguments, suffice to say that where he sees a qualitative difference between 1800 and 1900, I see a quantitative one. Where Kittler sees a radical discontinuity, or to put it into filmic terms, a cut or an edit, I see a dissolve or on overlap.12 Print culture overlaps with screen culture, just as manuscript culture did with print culture, or oral culture. They overlap, with film amplifying what print had already disturbed: the tranquil age. In this respect qualitative differences are ‘in fact quantitative differences of force’, as Nietzsche would have said (Wellbery in Kittler 1990, p.xxix). What we have seen is how the media of an age supply the models for that age’s self-conception. We have also seen how, in the experiential fabric of everyday life, the media are perceptual manipulators, operating on every dimension of physiological being. There is therefore a profound physical, physiological, technological and conceptual continuum being constantly re-engineered by emerging, undergoing and transitional media. This then is how media do not wait passively for the impress of imagination, but shape it. Even this presentation of continuity, quantitative and qualitative, is a conceptual product of an identifiable media technology: that of film. To demonstrate this, we turn now to the angel of history: A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly


contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Benjamin, 1973, pp.259–60) It is important to note that Walter Benjamin’s celestial messenger is travelling not through a medium-neutral history, but one shaped by successive media technologies: from a painting by Paul Klee to all the trappings Benjamin’s prose evokes of the moving pictures. Benjamin’s passage does more though than just evoke film. It is illustrative of the ways in which media work on our thinking: film does not think, it works on our thinking. The challenge then is this: if thinking is irreducibly mediated (print, film, computer, brain) how are we to define a medium, including film? To think through this circuit, in which media themselves are involved in their own conceptualization, is a key task of film-philosophy. One way in which to do this, as this chapter has sought to suggest, is to learn the lessons of media history. If we cannot separate a given medium, say film, from the wider mediasphere, since no medium stands alone but is always in a relation with old and new, established, dead or emerging media, any definition of a medium is always relational. It is here that media-philosophy comes into its own: it concerns itself with the ways in which the underlying conditions of mediality – the mediations of thinking – have changed in the course of history.

Notes 1. On the correlation in Nietzsche between stylus and style from a feminist and deconstructive point of view, see Derrida (1979). 2. ‘Sein’ in German means being, and ‘Dasein’ means existence, but should be translated here as ‘being-there’. 3. This section of my essay appeared as a book review in Comparative Critical Studies 6.3 (2009), 403–9. 4. As the title of this book also indicates, Kittler pursues a project of desouling, whereas Warner is deeply rooted in the humanities, to the extent that she laments our ‘desouling’ at the hands of contemporary communication

168

5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Wide Angles – The Boundaries of Film-Philosophy technologies, which she sees as careering us towards ‘zombiedom’ (2006, p.330, 378) and the bleak condition of a ‘post-human age, when human beings will no longer control the organising intelligence of the planet’ (p. 320). I am grateful to Iain Hamilton Grant for drawing my attention to this quotation. Both examples are used by Kittler (2010) to illustrate his thesis that ‘we knew nothing about our senses until media provided models and metaphors’, see pp.34–5, this quote, p.34. ‘Enframing’ is the translated term of the German ‘Ge-stell’, which Martin Heidegger uses to make a distinction between technology as a tool, which humans use as a means to an end, and technology as a framework. According to the logic of the former, technology is a support system; according to the logic of the latter, which Heidegger associates with modern technologies especially, technology enframes us to such an extent that we are compelled to ask ourselves whether it is us who are masters of technology, or whether it is technology which masters us (1977, pp.3–49). On the physiological impact of early film, see Littau (2002 and 2005). For a detailed discussion of these discourses, including their relation to gender, see Littau (2006, pp.36–82). For quotations by Beneken and Erwald, see König (1977, pp.95, 104). For quotation by Sellmann, see Schlüpmann (1990, p.203), and for Prels, see Hake (1993, p.52). I am thinking here of the overlap used by Georges Méliès in his 1902 film Journey to the Moon, when the rocket submerges into the ocean not once but twice as it descends to earth.

References Aristotle., 1996. Physics. Translated by R. Waterfield. Introduction by D. Bostock. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Assmann, A., 2006. Einführung in die Kulturwissenschaft. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag. Austin, A., 1874. ‘The Vice of Reading’, Temple Bar, XLII (September): 251–7. Behne, A., 1978. ‘Die Stellung des Publikums zur modernen deutschen Literatur [1926]’. In A. Kaes, ed. Kino-Debatte. Texte zum Verhältnis von Literatur und Film 1909–1929. Tübingen: Max Niemayer, pp. 160–3. Benjamin, W. 1973. ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. Bungay, Suffolk: Fontana, pp.255–66. Böhme, H., 2000. ‘Himmel und Hölle als Gefühlsräume’, in C. Benthien, A. Fleig and I. Kasten., eds. Emotionalität. Zur Geschichte der Gefühle. Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau Verlag, pp. 60–81. Butterworth, C. H., 1870. ‘Overfeeding’, Victoria Magazine 14 (November to April): 500–4. Debray, R., 1996. Media Manifestos. Translated by E. Rauth. London: Verso. ——2000. Transmitting Cultures. Translated by E. Rauth. New York: Columbia University Press.

The Ghost is the Machine: Media-Philosophy & Materialism 169 Derrida, J., 1979. Spurs / Eperons. Translated by B. Harlow. Chicago: Chicago University Press). Feather, J., 1988. A History of British Publishing. London: Routledge. Hake, S., 1993. The Cinema’s Third Machine: Writing on Film in Germany, 1907–1933. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Heidegger, M., 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated and Introduction by W. Lovitt. New York and London: Harper Colophon. ——1991. Nietzsche. Volumes One and Two. Translated by D. Krell. San Francisco: HarperCollins. Kittler, F.A., 1980. Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh. —— 1990. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Translated by M. Metteer, with C. Cullens and Foreword by D.E. Wellbery. Standford: Standford University Press. ——1997. Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays, J. Johnston, ed. Amsterdam: G&B Arts International. —— 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated and introduced by G. Winthrop-Young and M. Wutz. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —— 2006. ‘Number and Numeral’. Translated by G. Winthrop-Young, Theory, Culture & Society 23 (7–8): 51–61. ——2010. Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999. Translated by A. Enns. Cambridge: Polity. von König, D., 1977. ‘Lesesucht und Lesewut’. In H. G. Göpfert, ed. Buch und Leser: Vorträge des 1. Jahrtreffens des Wolfenbütteler Arbeitskreises für Geschichte des Buchswesen, 13. und 14. May 1976. Hamburg: Hauswedell Verlag, pp. 89–124. Kracauer, S., 1987. ‘The Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces [1926]’. Translated by T. Y. Levin. New German Critique 40 (Winter): 91–6. Kuhn, T., 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolution. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Littau, K., 2002. ‘Eye-Hunger: Physical Pleasure and Non-Narrative Cinema. In J. Arthurs and I.H. Grant, eds. Crash Cultures: modernity mediation and the material. Bristol: Intellect Books, pp. 3–51. —— 2005. ‘Lumière: Arrival of a Train at la Ciotat. Silent Cinema and Screaming Audiences’. In J. Geiger and R. L. Rutsky, eds. Film Analysis. A Norton Reader. New York: W. W. Norton, pp. 42–62. —— 2006. Theories of Reading. Books. Bodies and Bibliomania. Cambridge: Polity. McLuhan, M., 1964. Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ——1969. Counterblast. London: Rapp and Whiting. Nietzsche, F., (1967) ‘Zur Physiologie der Kunst [1888]’, In G. Colli and M. Montinari, eds. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Vol. VIII, 3. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 327–8. Translated by D.F. Krell as ‘Toward the Physiology of Art’, in M. Heidegger (1991) Nietzsche Vols 1 and 2. San Francisco: HarperCollins, p. 94. —— (1968) The Will to Power [1887/1888]. Translated by W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage. —— 1981. ‘An Heinrich Köselitz in Venedig (Typoscript), [Genua,] Ende Februar 1882’, in G. Colli and M. Montinari, eds. Briefwechsel. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. III.1: Briefe von Nietzsche: 1880–1884. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.

170


Plato, 1921. Theaetetus. Sophist. Translated by H. N. Fowler. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press. —— 1925. Statesman. Philebus. Ion , Vol. VIII of Plato (Loeb Classical Library, No. 164). Translated by H. Fowler and W. R. M. Lamb. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Poulet, G., 1980. ‘Criticism and the Experience of Interiority’. In Jane P. Tompkins, ed. Reader-Response Criticism. From Formalism to Post-Structuralism. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, pp. 41–9. Rees, E., 1913. ‘Rosalie Street and “The Pictures”‘, The Manchester Guardian (26. 2. 1913), rpt. Guardian (9. 10. 1999). Russell, B., 1953. Mysticism and Logic. London: Penguin. Schlüpmann, H., 1990. Unheimlichkeit des Blicks. Das Drama des frühen deutschen Kinos. Frankfurt: Stroemfeld / Roter Stern. Shand, A. I., 1879. ‘Contemporary Literature, VII: Readers’, Blackwood’s Magazine 126 (August): 235–56. Simmel, G., 1997. ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life [1903]’. Translated by H. Gert in D. Frisby and M. Featherstone, eds. Simmel on Culture. London: Sage, pp. 174–85. Warner, M., 2006. Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

10 Art, Cinema, Sex, Ontology: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the In-visible of Cinema Greg Tuck

Introduction In 1899 the English filmmaker George Albert Smith produced a film called The Kiss in the Tunnel. Smith’s film began with a shot of a train entering a tunnel, cut to a couple in a private carriage stealing a kiss and then returned to a shot of the train leaving the tunnel. Although silent, monochrome and only 67 seconds long, this three-shot film anticipates aspects of the dominant modes and techniques of filmmaking (narrative, editing, action continuity) that are with us today. Similarly, the film’s combination of the actual and the fictional raises a number of profound questions about the nature of cinema which still resonate. Smith’s film already sketches out the medium specificity of films and provides us with many of the fundamental elements of the cinematic experience. Despite the silence and the brevity Smith’s film is still just that: a fully formed film. Nothing is waiting to be produced that will prevent us calling our experience of The Kiss in the Tunnel a cinematic one.1 This is not simply a consequence of a technical effect, as the film is equally typical in its content, offering as it does an experience of the kinetic power of movement combined with a physical display of affection and desire. Indeed, this combined display of action and attraction could stand as a generic description of cinema more generally. Smith’s film merely renders the extraordinary capacity of the ‘movies’ to capture and expresses motion and emotion with clarity. This is not to claim that films do only this, or should be reduced to this, but it is such a fundamental aspect of so much of our cinematic experience that the relationship demands investigation. In what follows, I will draw together a number of strands from the thought of Maurice MerleauPonty that I believe shed light on the profound significance of such 171

172


experiences. Two things in particular make his philosophy suited to this task. First his holistic approach which places perception at the centre of experience offers a rich description of entwined and reversible relationships among sense, movement and desire. Second, his aesthetic theory deploys his description of these relationships to understand the affective and meaningful power of art. As such he not only offers us a valuable and productive method through which to expand our understanding of cinema. What is equally significant is how this understanding of cinema can enrich our understanding of philosophy itself. Although Merleau-Ponty did make direct claims about cinema, it is in his writings on painting that he develops his most sophisticated ideas about the nature of our aesthetic experience. In both painting and film he demands the synthesis rather than separation of object, creator and spectators, a relationship that unites people in the embodied activities of perception, creation and meaning. In both cases his descriptions point back to a shared world where incarnate beings actively engage in these activities such that the relationship between viewer and viewed, creator and object, perceiver and world are mutually productive. As a consequence of this emphasis on the experiential, embodied and behavioural aspect of art, Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic theory is also necessarily an investigation of being itself, in short, a form of ontology, in a complex and non-reductive form. The diversity and richness of artistic practice and experience points away from causal or mechanistic notions of ontology, such that if art does tell us something about our ‘essential’ being, it suggests a subtle and dynamic notion of what we mean by essence in such circumstances. For Merleau-Ponty such essences are wild and primordial and historic and collective, conferring difference as much as identity. Our experience of art also reminds us that our being is always a being with phenomena – the appearance of the world – such that being can never be separated from knowing, however ambiguous the relation between them. Interestingly, Merleau-Ponty also wrote about our sexual being as something which engages being and knowing in a particular situation. For Merleau-Ponty, beyond being simply a biological or psychological drive, sexual activity is an expression of a developmental and mutually negotiated behaviour which echoes and follows our more general way of being in the world. Existence should not be reduced to sex, nor should art be reduced to its sublimation for that matter, as both sex and art can be seen as lived expressions of a wider, more primordial notion of existence. Both activities rely on and reflect underlying structures and behaviours that link embodiment, perception and meaning such

Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the In-visible of Cinema 173

that our engagement with art objects is not entirely dissimilar to our sexual engagement with others. As well as acknowledging the shared ontological foundations of a range of human experience and behaviour, Merleau-Ponty’s ideas also allow us to recognise what binds certain practices into recognisable traditions. When it comes to painting for example, despite the historical and cultural variation, we are still able to recognise the existence of a dynamic, emergent yet coherent aesthetic tradition. We are happy to call a twelve-thousand year old mark on a cave wall, and another on a contemporary canvass, a ‘painting’ without this demanding that they be the same type of thing. If we can apply this aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic theory to cinema we will be in a position to map out what unifies our experience and understanding of The Kiss in the Tunnel with more contemporary examples of this aesthetic tradition. We will also be able to describe what this tradition suggests about human ontology, as well as suggest how other aspects of being, not least sexuality, articulate and add to this description.

From tunnels to caves This notion of an aesthetic tradition that is recognisable yet never completed was discussed by Merleau-Ponty in his essay Eye and Mind. Here, the prehistoric cave paintings at Lascaux were compared to modern art not in terms of their being primitive precursors, but as a fully formed manifestation of what painting is in general: an attempt to give body to things by turning vision into gesture and thought into paint, so as to express our experience of embodied, visual being, to others. As such, every act of painting expresses this goal while no painting ever fully achieves it. Such a concept of a tradition avoids accusations of teleology as it refuses a simplistic linear or predetermined notion of development without refusing the possibility of progress, or indeed, regression. As Merleau-Ponty writes: For if we cannot establish a hierarchy of civilisations or speak of progress – neither in painting nor even elsewhere – it is not because some fate impedes us; it is, rather, because the very first painting in some sense went to the farthest reach of the future. If no painting completes painting, if no work of art is itself ever absolutely completed, still each creation changes, alters, clarifies, deepens, confirms, exalts, re-creates, or creates by anticipation all the others. If creations are not permanent acquisitions, it is not just that, like all things, they pass away: it is also that they have their entire lives before them. (1993:149).

174


Two things emerge from this essay. First, an aesthetic tradition has a history but is not reducible to this history. All forms contribute to its development, but in dialogue with others rather than in a historical sequence. The paintings at Lascaux do not simply grant, but gain significance through their articulation and comparison with modern forms. Over time the tradition becomes richer but the individual forms are all, to a greater or lesser extent, pregnant with the possibility of painting as such. Second, while painting has a history and cultural specificity which means that we have to be cautious in claiming it is always essentially the same thing, this does not prevent us recognising a common behaviour. Painting requires the use of eye, hand and mind such that whatever cultural purpose the painted object is meant to serve, whatever likeness it is meant to capture, meaning it is meant to convey, or experience it is meant to evoke, the act of painting is always a manifestation of our embodied being. Hence, for Merleau-Ponty ‘any theory of painting is a metaphysics’(1993, p.132). What may seem like artistic concerns over the use of lines, colour, or form are profoundly philosophical issues. Painting does not just give us copies or images of things, but asks us to see as, or in accordance with another’s seeing, to wonder at the mute meaningfulness of the visible world. Painting is therefore inherently self-reflective, a manifestation of the act of seeing itself and the invisible underpinning which gives us the visible world. Before painting is about anything else, it is about our collective experience of vision itself. How can one see another’s seeing? For this to happen, seeing first has to become gesture, in order to then become a visible mark. This activity of literally making sense is only feasible if artist, thing and world, as well as the subsequent viewers of the artwork, are in some way intimately and primordially connected. After all, if vision is truly unique it is hard to know how one could make sense of another’s sense and the artist’s mark would be so subjective as to be meaningless. On the other hand, if vision were simply a universal experience it would be equally hard to understand the historical variation in such marks as the seeing which underpinned it would always be the same. There is something about the interrogation of vision present in the artwork that is both anonymous and collective while being produced and experienced from a unique and situated perspective. The variation encountered in painting expresses unique but not independent ways of seeing which suggests that such making sense is never objectively complete, but neither is it so utterly disconnected from the concerns, techniques and subjects of previous attempts to make sense that any individual painting can stand outside


of a general tradition. What connects them is neither an abstract universal idea nor a concrete biological capacity, but an existential drive. The ontology suggested by painting is not a fixed form of timeless being, but a dynamic and situated mode of human doing. While this results in a complex and ambiguous ontology, a lived synthesis that can never be fully mapped, art enables its operation to be demonstrated. While an understanding of the behaviour of painting contributes to a philosophy of perceptual being as in some sense a collective activity, it does so without calling on a dehistoricised universal essence to explain the commonality it identifies. Consequently there is no end to the ways of seeing and making meaning, of mapping the enigma of visibility and hence, no end to art. Painting opens up a rich field of possibility in which the ‘idea of a universal painting, of a totalization of painting, of painting’s being fully and definitely accomplished is an idea bereft of sense (ibid., p.148). A further consequence of this inexhaustibility is that there no beginning to art, at least not in the sense of an ur-text, the ancestor from which all subsequent art can trace its evolution in a grand progressive arc. To begin with, behind the beginning, is always another beginning. The paintings discovered from our ancient past can be said to inaugurate a pictorial tradition, but they do so only in as much as they already reflect an older tradition: the ‘making sense’ of the visible that is perception itself. Moreover, the achievements of these cave painters are not lacking completion or development. These are not proto-paintings, some missing link between an idle doodle and an artistic statement. What we see fully formed in the Lascaux paintings is the fact that they are more than lines of pigment on a wall, but a thing which give us, without effort, oxen, horses, stags. Another remarkable facet of these paintings shared with figurative art is that the figures which stand before us do so in a way that is radically different from the medium, the limestone rock face, on which they ‘appear’. We see them, yet they are neither simply ‘there’ like the rock, or indeed ‘elsewhere’, and as Merleau-Ponty claimed one ‘is hard pressed to say where the painting is I am looking at’. (ibid., p.126). Already, the paradox of ‘presence’ fundamental to the notion of a visual likeness seems to be at play. The image is not simply a pale imitation of an absent thing. It is a concrete mark, a thing which has its own materiality, but also an evocation of a particular animal in a particular pose while equally the presentation of a universal idea of this animal. This idea, this essence that is conjured up before us is not a cognitive interpretation, something which belongs to an ideal realm (the non-visible), but a mute meaning which is present in-the-visible. For Merleau-Ponty

176


this is where aesthetics becomes ontology because what the artistic mark demonstrates is the more general condition of visibility itself. We ‘see’ meaning before we ‘make’ meaning and neither the material thing nor the immaterial idea can be cleaved from the other. Nor can it be placed in a determining or determined position in respect to the other without doing violence to what we experience and what we do. Being cannot be reduced to either the empirically visible or the intellectually invisible as visibility and invisibility are not opposites, but aspects of the same experience. The invisible is a complex term for Merleau-Ponty, and Galen Johnson has provided a useful summary (1993, p.53). The invisible includes that which could be seen, the potentially visible horizon which structures the gestalt of our visible perceptual field, but is simply not present to vision at this moment. It also includes dimension, mass and so on, which are ‘there’ in the visible but in a nonfigurative sense. Another invisible presence is all our other non-visual senses such as touch, smell and kinesthesisia which vision could induce and call on. Finally, there is meaning and ideas, though these are not necessarily outside the visible, as they are arrived at through engaged seeing prior to abstract thinking. Painting brings all these aspects of invisibility into visible play and for Merleau-Ponty even the so called ‘primitive’ visual representations at Lascaux already offer a sophisticated and reflexive notion of what painting is: ‘the “visible” to the second power, a carnal essence or icon of the first’ (ibid., p.126). They are neither the arbitrary signifiers of ideas nor experienced as indistinguishable from the real thing, but seem to manifest our engagement with these visible, visceral creatures while commenting on the possibility of such a visual engagement. For what purpose they were made, spiritual, educational, philosophical, pleasurable, we cannot possibly know, but that does not preclude us from being solicited by these images. Even to our modern eye, thousands of years after their creation and despite the obscurity of their meaning, the images seem to contain and keep alive the painters’ original visual fascination with the animals, their urge or need to display and interrogate seeing. How they cared about these images is unknowable; that they cared about them is unmistakable. This quality of aboutness, of a certain engagement and urgency, is vital to Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of ontology and its significance to film is an issue we shall return to in the conclusion. For now, all that need be acknowledged is that through their capacity to raise vision to the second power, to be not just visible but to about visibility as such and to open another person’s seeing to us, paintings


manifest our more general visual relationship with things in the world. While we remain blasé to seeing in our everyday lives, painting reminds us of the complexity of seeing a thing, let alone a world. We might not all have the skill or curiosity of the artist, we might be preoccupied and careless, but we can see as they do. Theirs is a disciplined and practised seeing, a self-reflexive amplification of what we all do, but the fundamental relationship between vision, movement and thought is a more general existential capacity. Rather than a process of mechanical recording, vision becomes an active process of fascination, curiosity, beckoning, interrogation and interpretation whereby visible things actively solicit our visual involvement with them. The artist is in a visual dialogue with the world, aware of themselves as both seer and seen. For Merleau-Ponty it was this primordial reversibility at the heart of painting that gave artists a privileged place when it came to explorations of ontology. Before asking what something is and what it means in the abstract sense, painting is a confrontation with ‘the “there is”, which precedes it: to the site and soil of the sensible and humanly modified world such as it is in our lives and for our bodies’ (ibid., p.122). Against the ordered yet reductive approaches to being that would split and categorise the complex, messy totality of our being into more disciplined yet unlived notions, art returns us to their unruly existential synthesis. ‘Essence and existence, imaginary and the real, visible and invisible – painting scrambles all our categories, spreading out before us its oneiric universe of carnal essences, actualised resemblances, mute meaning’ (ibid., p.130).

Seeing according to cinema What is true of painting, I suggest, is also true of film, albeit in different ways. Its materials and methods are different, and its mechanical nature radically distinguishes its aesthetic capacities from painting. But it equally gives us, without effort, a seemingly impossible synthesis of the visible and the invisible, dreams and reality, ephemera and palpable things. It, too, makes things appear according to its particular way of being. My claim about the ontological revelation offered by seemingly diverse aesthetic phenomena is not, it is hoped, a homogenisation of all artistic practice. Neither is it to dismiss the social and political articulation and uses that are imposed onto artistic practice. My analysis does not eliminate the need for investigation of artistic specificity. It is, however, to acknowledge the existence of a fundamental ontological concern with what is; a concern that no human culture seems capable

178


of either ignoring or accounting for. With this in mind, let us now turn to cinema and ask how does it behave and what does it reveal about such speculation? Writing at a rather earlier stage in his career, Merleau-Ponty identified, albeit in less developed form, a similar relationship between artistic expression and perceptual being in cinema. He went as far as to claim that ‘the movies were peculiarly suited to make manifest the union of mind and body, mind and world, and the expression of one in the other’ (1964, p.58). As with the activity and experience of painting, the activity and experience of cinema is exemplary of our more general perceptual, conceptual, aspectual, intentional and embodied being. Films use stuff from the world to bring forth ideas about the world which are themselves new things within the world. They offer us a seeing about seeing which has no need to undergo translation into words to be meaningful. Clearly, the value and power of this meaning varies depending on whether the film in question is a creative engagement and extension of the cinematic tradition or a lazy repetition of tired themes and forms. Yet whether offered insight or cliché, we see the worlds captured on film according to the way the film sees them and they do not require our experience of them to reveal these things and these worlds. While it might be objected that their mechanical nature severs the link between vision and body present in painting, an objection I will return to in the conclusion, for now we need merely note that painting itself is not bereft of mechanical mediation. Canvasses need to be made, pigments crushed, brushes, palette knives or even sticks, fabricated. The brush stroke is not the same as a camera pan, the chiaroscuro produced in paint not identical to that forged in light, yet both are premised on the active expression of perception by other means. It is in this sense that I want suggest that Early Cinema in general and Smith’s film in particular already fully partake in, without exhausting or delimiting, the style of the ‘movies’. They challenge us to grasp how a ghost world, one which seems to offer a thing both present and absent, can develop a complex relationship between showing and telling, the sensory and the sensible and the captured and the created. Similar to the creatures on the Lascaux walls, the world of film is both present and absent, both visible here and now yet gesturing to an elsewhere. While the path taken by the development of moving image art and culture was not strictly predetermined by its origins, such openness is not anarchy. A relationship exists between past and present that remains mutually formative and informative. In this respect Smith’s film seems pregnant with cinema’s future possibilities, while those possibilities which have


come to pass, reinvigorate the potential of Smith’s film to remain both meaningful and affective. So what does Smith’s film achieve and what is it about? As with the Lumières’ famous (if not infamous) train film, Arrivée d’un train en gare à La Ciotat (France, 1896) Smith’s film begins with an image of a train coming towards the front of the shot. As the train comes closer, something remarkable happens as suddenly we, or more precisely the frame, begin to move towards the oncoming train. Once it occurred to filmmakers to put the camera on a train, boat or other moving vehicle rather than film from a static position, such phantom rides, particularly within scenic environments or famous cities (trains entering Paris, boats docking at Istanbul) became popular subjects. Beyond mere animated photography, an experience of movement within a frame as presented in the Lumières’ film, such rides produced a properly moving image. Beyond seeing an object move we have a first person experience of ‘us’, the spectator, moving through this ‘reel’ world. This went beyond the representation of particular bodies or places on screen. Instead, such films offer us an experience in some way akin to lived embodiment, of both being there and being animated, which seem allied to our experience of the real world. Such films do not simply show movement. Rather, they express it, coupling it, as it is in the real world, with vision. Unlike in the Lumières’ film, Smith’s camera was not positioned on a named station occupying a fixed and definable space, but on the front of a train somewhere along an anonymous track. As such there were no expectant passengers or platform to anchor what we are seeing, no famous sights to observe. Smith’s film is a very different type of travelogue as the geography involved is more psychic than scenic. Instead of arriving or passing through a destination, the train heads towards the darkness of a tunnel. Rather than entering a world we seem to be leaving one. As we go into the tunnel the pitch black screen allows for yet another innovation in filmmaking, an edit, and we are suddenly presented with a long shot of two figures sitting opposite each other in a staged scene located in a private railway carriage. The jump does not feel like a schism, a leap from one thing to something entirely other, but an unfolding, a describing, a form of showing which is also a telling. Yet this is a mute rather than strictly linguistic telling, an aspect of meaning which is of the visible, or something in-the-visible, while not straightforwardly an object of vision. We are told by the edit and shown by the new image that our journey is no longer through the outside world, but has folded into the train itself. It has taken three forms of

180


movement: within the frame, of the frame and between the frames, to transport us here. From the luggage that surrounds them and from their relaxed attitude our couple appear to be going on or returning from holiday. A mixture of good mood and the secrecy of the tunnel cause the man to stand and mime his affection for the woman. He stands, facing towards the front, but looking at the woman with his arms stretched wide. He gently touches her face, leans in and kisses her cheek, he pulls back beaming with pleasure and leans in for a second kiss. He is met halfway by the woman who leans forward to accept and encourage his affection. The man returns to his seat, but in his rather distracted state of happiness, sits on his hat. The couple laugh, he repairs it best he can and the couple then return to reading their book and newspaper, looking profoundly at ease in each other’s company. Compared with the theatrical miming that precedes the kiss the sense of calm that now pervades the scene seems almost post-coital. The screen goes black and we find ourselves once again on the front of the train as it approaches the exit of the tunnel, returning us back into the world and the sunlight on the other side. A double narrative has unfolded before us, with a clear tripartite structure. We witness a journey on a train with a clear beginning, middle and end, and a moment in a relationship which maps the psychic and physical progression from excitation, through action to serenity. However, at the literal and figural centre of Smith’s film is a kiss, which is clearly central to what we see and how we see it. It is what the film is ‘about’. If we focus on this aspect alone, what does it reveal?2 Despite the couple presented being the height of late Victorian probity, the catalogue at pains to define them as married and their behaviour more affectionate than passionate, this kiss does seem to be about the pleasurable and physical materialisation of a shared desire and the situations which permit such activities to be engaged in. In this respect it seems permissible to claim that this kiss is not just a kiss, but is itself ‘about’ sex.

Sex seen and unseen What is meant by sex in such a claim must remain to some extent open if it is to account for the richness of this concept. Clearly, the task of untangling the actual from the ideological and the normative from the truthful in regards to the meaning of sex in Smith’s film is complex. Yet this complexity and ambiguity does not prevent us from identifying the presence or absence of such meanings. It is permissible to say that the paintings in Lascaux are about the animals depicted and how they can be depicted,


and the same can be said of the sexual element of The Kiss in the Tunnel. However, if the animals at Lascaux are as much about their creators as their object, the visibility of sex is never simply about sex. For MerleauPonty sex is not behaviour cut off from the rest of our lives or our mode of embodiment. Neither is it our overwhelming existential concern such that art is merely its sublimation. Sexuality is a way of being in the world, a style of intentional and perceptual being, a form of behaviour that as with art, reflects and follows more general ways of being. Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on synthesis means that our being is not compartmentalised but an imbrication of repetitious modes that while aimed at different goals and objects, all make manifest different styles of that being. All forms of being, including our sexual being, deploy, engage and entwine our embodied and mental capacities in a way that reveals their more general existential operation. As he claimed in Phenomenology of Perception, if we ‘try to see how a thing or a being begins to exist for us through desire or love […] we shall thereby come to understand better how things and being can exist in general’ (1962, p.178). Sexual life is itself a synthesis of material things (bodies, behaviours or historical and cultural settings) with our ideas and motivations (desire, intimacy, legitimacy). So, if both aesthetic and sexual practices offer a site through which to understand Merleau-Ponty’s ontological model, while their specific style articulates something of their cultural and historical specificity, what is revealed in their combination? Despite its supposed simplicity, there is a complex intertwining of potential meanings ‘about’ sex woven together in Smith’s film. First, this film is about sex in terms of the content of the image itself: two people kissing. While not exactly raunchy it is still an image of physical intimacy in which embodied subjects respond to each other’s embodied intentions. Their behaviour towards each other is both evidence of a consciousness and a situated body that responds and reflects a desire, hence both visible and invisible. The intimacy is remediated by codes and conventions of representation, performance and spectatorship. The mode of representation itself is not simply a physical mimesis of a particular act, but also of an expression of a situation. They are alone because they have a private carriage, itself a marker of an intimacy afforded to them as a privilege of their class. This is not us simply spying on a man and a woman from the lower orders, but an insight into the lives of a Lady and a Gentleman. They are in a tunnel so believe they are unseeable, but their excuse is also ours as we know they can have no knowledge of our seeing. Furthermore, we do not see them, as they are entirely absent. For this reason voyeurism is an inaccurate

182


analogy for our engagement with cinematic sexual representations. It also obscures the fundamental exhibitionism of cinema and the reversibility between the pleasure being represented on screen and our own off-screen enjoyment. At one level their behaviour seems to follow normative notions of gender. The man is standing and active, the woman sitting and receptive such that there is the kisser and the kissed. The man is on the left, the woman on the right so the visual grammar leads us from him to her. Yet the sexual intentionality goes both ways as by the second kiss the woman is actively reaching out to him as he has to her. Beyond the simplistic binary of active and passive we have a more nuanced relationship between request and permission, call and response. Sexuality is not simply present, but produced as the scene unfolds. He is emphatic, she is more relaxed, but both seem to gain a familiar pleasure from the act. What we see is clearly not just a kiss, but the manifestation of a wider relationship. There are also all the things that the scene seems to rule out. This is not a seduction or an imposition, there is no pulling away or reticence, yet it is not an entirely innocent mark of affection. While we get the impression that this is a well-established couple, the activity of kissing is clearly still affective and distracting enough to cause our man to sit on his hat. Metaphors abound here but as always with cinematic representations, hats are still hats and trains thundering into tunnels are indeed still trains. Neither mimesis nor metaphor fully accounts for these experiences and beyond a representation of things as either literal and metonymic or literary and metaphoric we seem to gain direct access to an internal state as invisible feelings, as well as visible actions, are given to us. Sitting on one’s hat might be one of the gentlest demonstrations of the distracting consequences of desire, but it is an example of it nevertheless. In later films, this visibility explored here would be intensified, showing in magnified, almost forensic close-up the precise tilt of the head, the closing of the eyes and pressure on the lips. At the same time, in combination with musical crescendos and pans, fades and ellipses, kisses could imply far more than was shown provoking invisible thoughts and questions about what the kissers were feeling and where kissing might lead (see Tuck, 2007). In short, this kiss opens up the potential for cinematic kisses to be about sex in ways that are mimetic, metonymic and metaphoric, both deeply ideological and profoundly revelatory. The kiss is a kiss as well as so much more than just a kiss. This is why cinematic sexual imagery more generally is always far more than an erotic spectacle. Sex on film, regardless of the filmmaker’s motivation, involves


precise sexual behaviours that manifest more vague yet motivational sexual desires, while the mode and style of presentation articulate and reveal wider discourses and ideologies of sexual difference and sexual politics. Films are about sex as both a visible material practice and an invisible conceptual schema, a representational content of an embodied act and a complex articulation of ideas about perception, embodiment, desire and difference. It is now that we may finally return to the concept of ‘aboutness’ to examine what it means for a film to be ‘about’ sex and what this suggests about our wider existential situation.

Intentionality, meaning and motion When we claim that films are ‘about’ sex, or indeed ‘about’ anything, it is frequently their capacity to entwine material actuality and conceptual commentary that we are referring to. As we have noted, for Merleau-Ponty, our experience of cinema’s strange amalgam of things and ideas, being and knowing, was revelatory of something with a wider existential significance. The amalgam of what they show and tell is the same as that experienced in painting, which in turn was a revelation of perception more generally. Perceptions are neither ideal judgments nor brute sensations, but engagements that are meaningful and directed. Our sexual being, how we engage with the world and how others take on and solicit erotic significance, follows similar underlying ontological modes of engaged, expressive, perceptual being. Sexual perception, artistic perception and perception in general are all object-directed; they are all aimed at something. The object-directedness of cinema’s engagement with its content, its of-ness or aboutness, also mirrors our own more general object-directness, or as it is called in phenomenology, our intentionality. Intentionality as originally developed by Edmund Husserl characterised consciousness as about something such that there was neither the possibility of pure contentless thought disengaged from the world, nor a world of things that could be cleaved from the consciousness intending towards them. However, Merleau-Ponty radically materialises Husserl’s notion by going beyond the intentionality of thought and demanding the intentionality of embodiment itself. As I type on these keys, look up as someone passes my widow or turn my head to the noise of birdsong, I experience motor intentionality. Against the paralysed passivity of sensation or the disengaged mastery of cognition, Merleau-Ponty’s bodysubject describes a meaningful way of being and engaging in the world in an unfolding existential dialogue. Hence coordinated movements of

184


limbs, fingers, eyes, reveals their own primordial intentionality, their being about the world. The things of the world discovered through such dialogue are not external objective referents, nor internalised representations, but evidence of the expressive unity of perceiver and perceived, a perceptual synthesis that gains meaningfulness from motion and vision as much as cognition. Such motor intentionality is congealed in the brush stokes of a painting and more actively present in the viewer who moves their eyes and walks around the canvass to engage with the painting. But what happens when motor intentionality is augmented or remediated by technical means? While, as already suggested, painting, even in its earliest manifestation, is a technical process, there does seem to be something even more mediated by the process of filmmaking, a sort of electric motor intentionality and chemical process intentionality that take us further from the body. If between the human bodies who make, watch or are on films are machines with levels of autonomy beyond anything experienced in painting, can we say cinema manifests motor intentionality in the same way? What precisely is the intentional status of the movements on screen, the movement of the screen and the movement between the screens? What ontology do they lay bare and how does the motor intentionality of the spectator relate to our experience of the film? The first movement, animation, gives vitality to the image in an extraordinary way, but it is not in itself cinema. Such gross movements were visible in animated form in the magic lantern shows of the previous century as well as in live action film form in the individual peep show experience of the Kinetoscope machine. When such images were projected, however, they did not simply get bigger; the visibility of the entire world was given over. Now the fine detail of swaying background foliage, the movement of crowds, the swirling of smoke, the slightest crease at the corner of an eye were ‘there’. The sheer density of moving things, the inexhaustibility of intentional motion produced a lattice of interwoven relations, which felt much like our normal perception. At one level it might seem that the image feels unthought, too casual in its ability to capture everything that lay before it for us to feel that it is the perception of another. Indeed, even ignoring the absence or presence of sound and colour the frame alone seems too sharp a delineation to feel like human sight. Yet at the same time this is not simply chaos, as certain things – trains, lovers, kisses – emerge from this complexity and make themselves seen. As with the animals at Lascaux such appearing is given rather than found. Unlike normal perception we are keenly aware, as with the things made


present by the painter, that this is not simply ‘our’ direct experience of the world, our immediate intentional engagement, as it comes via some ‘other’. As Vivian Sobchack describes it, the visibility of the frame is actually a product of our seeing, it belongs to us, not to the film as the ‘frame is invisible to the seeing that is the film. It is a limit, but like that of our vision it is inexhaustibly mobile and free to displace itself’ (1992, p.131). The image combines our seeing with another’s such that we are seeing things and seeing seeing. As with the Lascaux animals, the image was of a thing in the world and an understanding of that thing. Several modes of invisibility grant access to this intentionality. The visible movement on screen is accompanied by another invisible one, the film strip itself advancing through the projector, the gesture which lies at the heart of this temporal unfolding of things in space. This movement is easy to forget, but once it is augmented by the movement of the frame rather than simply the objects within it, the film seems to be making intentional choices about what to look at such that this no longer feels like a view from either nowhere or anywhere. As with our own vision, this perspectival dimension suggests a spectating presence that is both felt to be there, witnessing and intending the scene, and here giving us an impression of it. The invisible intentionality of this ‘other’ seeing is made apparent by the shifting of perspective which changes how, rather than simply what, is seen, bringing it into the order of vision while simultaneously offering intentionality as the invisible weft that gives the warp of vision meaning. The image feels intentional and meant and in combination with the verisimilitude of the image, seems to be capturing a unique view of our own world, less in a geographic or mimetic sense than in an existential one. The final movement, the movement between frames, magnifies this process. The edit, which is present to vision in-the-visible, but is itself invisible, manifest a thinking through the visible, a thought made with the conjoining of one visibility to another. The strange subject/ object synthesis, this mixture of visibility and invisibility, describes how film achieves the communication of motility, perception and conception via its own modes of motility, perception and conception. This is why our experience of movies, the ways in which we engage with them and in which they make and grant ‘sense’ tells us something about our wider existential experience. They reflect on our way of generally being in the world at the level of their form as well as reflecting on our more historically and culturally specific way of being at the level of their content. The film is not merely a recording of an elsewhere, a container or chimera, but a thing in itself, and we

186


know this thing in itself because, and not in spite of, the ontological co-dependence of the elements of film experience. It is in this sense that it not only takes a body to make a film or to watch a film but also to be a film. While films are not the same as us, the precise form of their embodiment is dependent on its distance from – and articulation with – the type of embodied phenomena that we are. As Sobchack describes: Nonetheless, insofar as the film’s material conditions for providing access to the world, accomplishing the communication of perception and expression, and constituting or signifying a significant coherence are different from our own, they provide us actual and possible modes of becoming other than we are. Thus even as human bodies engage the film’s body in an always correlated activity (whether of filmmaking or spectating), the film’s material body also always engages us in its possibilities as a nonhuman lived body. (1992, p.162). What is suggested is not a reduction of filmic perception ‘to’ our own perception or an attempt to make it ‘like’ ours. Their mechanical and technical nature means they do not ‘see’, ‘hear’ and ‘move’ like we do, but they grant sense and make sense in ways that seem closely allied to our own. They give us a world that makes sense, precisely because it is neither simply identical to nor alien from our own. They tell us things about our experience of perception directly through intentional acts of perception that link, rather than divide, mind and matter, self and other. It is embodied perceptual experience, behaviour both anonymous and particular, thought and experienced, experienced both directly and through mediation which entwines, rather than divides, the sensory and the sensate. We may never be able to say what being is, but we know what it does and that it dwells in the dialectic between the imaginary and the actual and can be fully accounted for by neither. Hence as Merleau-Ponty argues, to understand the existential ‘we need a philosophy of both history and spirit to deal with the problems we touch upon here’ (1973, p.3). Smith was a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and prior to being a filmmaker he was well-known for giving slide lectures on popular science. But he also ran a pleasure garden on the British South coast that offered more extraordinary entertainments, such as a gypsy fortune teller, a health-giving spring and a cave with a resident hermit.3 We see in Smith an interest in the visible and the empirical as well as the invisible and the magical, the discovered and the constructed, a pursuit of knowledge and a purveyor of wonder. It is this strange amalgam that lies at the heart of our experience of film, an experience that seems


in excess of most of the definitions we apply to it. It is in its nature both chiasmic, a weaving together of these modes, and ambiguous, a revelation which resists being so easily fixed or defined. The sense of ambiguity cannot be a source of rebuke because ‘an existential theory of history is ambiguous […] it is inherent to things’ (1962, p.172). Cinema cannot help but be philosophical because within it, our experience of the enigma of perception is once again writ large.

Notes 1. By ‘cinematic’ I refer to the collective experience of projected film at a general level rather than a specific mode of institutionalised exhibition. In its day Smith’s film might have been enjoyed as part of a music hall programme, shown in a tent at a fairground or during a talk at a town hall: anywhere but a cinema as we now understand it. While these different exhibition sites would have contextualised the experience of the film in a variety of ways, the general aesthetic/ontological structure that articulates the phenomenological centre of such experiences, projected live action motion pictures, remains the same. 2. For a analysis of other kissing films from Early Cinema see Williams (2008). 3. See DVD booklet Early Cinema, Primitives and Pioneers, BFI 2005.

References Johnson G., 1993, ‘Ontology and Painting’ in G. Johnson (ed.) The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty M., 1993, ‘Eye and Mind’ in G. Johnson (ed.) The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty M.,1962, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith, London: Routledge. Merleau-Ponty M.,1964, ‘Film and the New Psychology’, in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. H. Dreyfus and P. Dreyfus, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty M.,1968, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty N.,1973, Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. J. Bien, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Sobchack V., 1992, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tuck G.,2007, ‘The Embodied Pleasure of Invisible Sex: Cinematic Meaning, Sexual Metaphors and the Dialectics of Editing’, in T. Jeffers-McDonald & E. Wells (eds) Realities and Remediations: Film at the Limits of Representation, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. Williams L.,2008 ‘Of Kisses and Ellipses: The Long Adolescence of American Movies (1896–1963) Screening Sex, Durham CA: Duke University Press.


Part III Directors Cut – Readings in Film Philosophy


11 Fleshing Out the Image: Phenomenology, Pedagogy, and Derek Jarman’s Blue Vivian Sobchack

This absolute emptiness is observable only at the moment when it is filled by experience. We do not ever see it, so to speak, except marginally. It is perceptible only on the ground of the world. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1946, p. 41) Isn’t it the truth of the voice to be hallucinated? Isn’t the entire space of the voice an infinite one? Roland Barthes (1972, p. 184) In what follows, I want to address the reciprocity between two questions: What might a particular philosophical tradition bring to the study of film? and What might film studies bring to the practice of philosophy? Here, explored from a pedagogical perspective, my exemplar is existential phenomenological philosophy as it illuminates – and is illuminated by – Derek Jarman’s seemingly ‘monochromatic’ film, Blue (UK, 1993). Made when the filmmaker was almost completely blind and dying of AIDS and theatrically released in 1993, Blue is an instance of cinematic perception and expression at their extremity. Seemingly without figures, the screen rectangle is filled with a field of cobalt blue (except for a flash of white light at the end) as a soundtrack of voices, sound effects, and music weaves a poetic and fragmented first-person narrative of Jarman’s observations, memories, and emotions in relation to his failing eyesight, horrific medical experiences, and approaching death, all in the context of a larger community of lovers, friends, and strangers living with and dying from AIDS. Blue not only elicits extremely positive or negative responses from most of those who experience it but also challenges our ‘natural attitude’ (better termed ‘naturalized attitude’) about the phenomenon we call a ‘film.’ 191

192

Directors Cut – Readings in Film-Philosophy

Screening Blue seems to me an ideal way to begin ‘Visual Perception,’ a graduate seminar in critical media studies that I teach at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. Shown in 35mm and a theatrical setting, the film’s particular sensual and categorical provocations allow me to introduce students to phenomenological method (and philosophy) as a mode of empirical and qualitative research that demands focus not only on the cinematic text but also on the cinematic experience. My pedagogical goal is to forestall my graduate students’ habitual rush into the abstraction of theoretical and formal ‘analysis’ or contextual ‘readings.’ Phenomenological method insists on an embodied as well as reflective engagement with the cinema, grounding such secondary ‘analyses’ and ‘readings’ in a ‘fleshed out’ and synthetic description, thematization, and interpretation that, I would argue, should be foundational for film and media studies. Phenomenological method’s ‘fleshing out’ of the film experience also makes palpable the basic precepts of existential phenomenology – not only for film students but also for those studying philosophy. Indeed, as French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1947, p. 58) suggests, the cinema is a phenomenological art, ‘peculiarly suited to make manifest the union of mind and body, mind and world, and the expression of one in the other.’ Through its particular perceptive and expressive technology, the cinema’s modes of perception and expression not only refer to embodied experience but also use embodied experience (of material enworldedness, orientation, movement, seeing, hearing, and reflection) as the medium of such reference. A radical transformation of photography (and, as with Blue, not even completely dependent upon it), the cinema made the dynamic action of vision visible for the very first time: choosing its objects as it prospects the world, displacing itself in space, time, and reflection, and always engaged in making meaning. Cinema thus makes the phenomenological concept of ‘intentionality’ explicit; it becomes sensible as a materially-embodied and activelydirected structure through which meaning is constituted in an on-going sensual, reflexive, and reflective process that, entailed with the world and others, is always creating its own provisional history or narrative of becoming. In effect, the cinema enacts what is also being enacted by its viewer. Thus, as I’ve elaborated in The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Sobchack, 1992), the film experience entails at least two viewers viewing (film and spectator) in a dynamic relational structure. Even such an extreme case as Blue reveals (and, indeed, illuminates) the essentially embodied, intentional, and meaningful entailment of

Phenomenology, Pedagogy, and Derek Jarman’s Blue

193

two perceptive and expressive subjects who, in their respective (and supposed) ‘deprivation’ of sight and its objects, are not only engaged in a sensually-enhanced mode of audiovisual experience but also intraand intersubjectively enriched by intensely reflexive (as well as dialogic and dialectical) forms of ‘insight.’ Indeed, whether valued positively or negatively, the experience of Blue makes explicit Merleau-Ponty’s description of cinema as the union of mind and body and mind and world and their expression of one in the other – not only in and as the film but also between the film and its viewer/listener. Phenomenological investigation of this conjunction of viewer/listener and film thus entails correlating the dynamics, modulations, and effects of (subjective) acts of audiovisual cinematic perception with (objective) structures of cinematic expression. This involves not only seeking out the symmetries of acts and structures that both constitute the film object and the ways in which it is taken up by the viewer/listener but also their asymmetries. That is, particular modulations (or variations) of cinematic experience in relation to a given film are identified and described but then interpreted within the more general structures of the experience. These opening remarks sum up to great degree why I want to introduce film students to phenomenological method – and to its foundational premises. Existential phenomenology’s call to an awareness of our lived experience of the objects we study seems to me of the utmost importance in the context of the commonly abstractive practices of the humanities disciplines in today’s research university. Today, most graduate students are in such a hurry to ‘professionalize’ and ‘talk the talk’ of their disciplines that they often forget to attend to their own experience of ‘seeing’ and ‘listening’ – or they devalue it. Instead, they rush to quote others, and describe their objects of study through a range of ‘floating signifiers’ that tend to overdetermine and foreclose their objects and their descriptions before the latter have even really begun. Hermeneutically sophisticated yet overly dependent upon ‘received knowledge,’ these students are also secretly insecure and worried that everyone else ‘knows’ more than they do – and intellectually aware of ‘the death of the subject,’ they are highly suspicious of their own ‘subjective’ experience. They ignore, mistrust, and devalue it as trivial, mistaken, or irrelevantly singular – this last, a false, indeed arrogant, humility that unwittingly rejects intersubjectivity, sociality, and culture. Thus, ignoring the apodicticity (or initial certainty) and presence of their own lived-bodies engaged in being-in-the-world (and in the cinema), their thought about the world (and cinema) has no existential ground of its own from which to empirically proceed.

194


Phenomenological inquiry affords redress to this contemporary situation: it insists we dwell on the ground of experience before moving on to more abstract or theoretical concerns, that we experience and reflect upon our own sight before we (dare I pun?) cite others. Nonetheless, my preamble here as to ‘why phenomenology?’ is not something I initially present to the students in my ‘Visual Perception’ seminar. Rather we turn to Blue and begin – for, as Don Ihde (1979, p. 14) claims, ‘Without doing phenomenology, it may be practically impossible to understand phenomenology.’ Before the first substantive seminar meeting, students attend a screening of Blue and are also assigned Ihde’s Experimental Phenomenology: An Introduction (1979). Accessible in style and full of phenomenological exercises, this little volume presents an overview of phenomenology (what and why it is, and how it proceeds) as well as translating more arcane descriptions of phenomenological method into what seems a rather humble set of five operational ‘hermeneutic rules’ (or critical commitments) that guide phenomenological inquiry (and will be elaborated in what follows). Ihde then focuses on our visual field as his initial exemplary object, first pointing out its invariants and providing a basic vocabulary for its description. What follows are a series of increasingly difficult exercises in phenomenological ‘seeing’ – these based on investigation of the visual perception of seemingly simple line drawings of multi-stable visual objects such as the Necker cube and other reversible figures and optical illusions. The variants possible to the perception of these drawings beyond their ‘first appearance’ are not only identified and described but also increase – this enabled not only by shifting the figures’ position on the page but also by provoking new modes of seeing them through contextualizing narratives (these, as we shall see, highly relevant to the perception of Blue’s ‘blueness’). Experimental Phenomenology thus sensitizes students to the ways even seemingly ‘simple’ visual figures are habitually ‘taken up’ and appear to their perception in limited ways that foreclose many of their visual possibilities. Further, it also allows them to do phenomenology and, by expanding the limits of their own perception, to see why it might be a valuable qualitative method of empirical research. At this point, however, students are not yet sure how to apply what they’ve done perceptually with a Necker cube to their perceptual experience of a film. Thus, in our engagement with Blue, we begin by following Ihde’s hermeneutic rules – as well as the order of inquiry appropriate to phenomenological method. That inquiry does not, as students may believe, begin with the perceiving subject. Indeed, Ihde (1979, pp. 50–1) writes, it is ‘the inverse of introspective analysis,’ in which ‘the ‘I’ claims


195

direct, immediate and full-blown self-awareness as an initial and given certain.’ Rather, investigation ‘moves from that which is experienced towards its reflexive reference in the how of experience, and terminates in the constitution of the ‘I’ as the correlated counterpart’ of the thing experienced (p. 50). That is, ‘the phenomenological ‘I’ takes on its significance [only] through its encounter with things, persons, and every type of otherness it may meet’ (p. 51). The initial tasks, then, to quote Ihde’s first and second hermeneutic rules (p. 34), are: ‘attend to the phenomena of experience as they appear’ and to ‘describe, don’t explain.’ As he writes, these ‘first methodological moves seek to circumvent certain kinds of predefinition’ or ‘any sort of theory, idea, concept or construction that attempts to go behind phenomena, to give the reasons for a phenomenon, or account for it in terms other than what appears’ (p. 31). I might, for example, at the outset, have asked students, ‘Is Blue a film?’ but this question implies a theory and set of predefined criteria for what a film is rather than attending to what was before us. Certainly, this question was articulated in a few reviews of Blue or some negative user comments on the Internet Movie Database (hereafter IMDB), but, following phenomenological method, it must be addressed at a later point – and not through a theory of cinema but through a set of thought-experiments or phenomenological variations. My first question, then, is ‘What did you see and hear?’ A phenomenological ‘description’ of Blue emerges initially in cursory and habituated perceptual responses – these then interrogated by a ‘careful looking [that] precedes classification and systematization’ (Ihde, 1979, p. 32). Critical here is Ihde’s third hermeneutic rule of phenomenological description (p. 36): ‘Horizontalize or equalize all immediate phenomena. Negatively put, do not assume an initial hierarchy of ‘realities’ that might foreclose the phenomenon’s possibilities.’ As class discussion develops, so does the radical difference between description in the ‘naturalized attitude’ and description that emerges from a careful looking at and hearing of the object and its modes of appearing. This difference is also reflected in (and cross-checked through) a range of discourses that extend beyond the classroom: mass media film (and DVD) reviews, comments by IMDB users, and academic essays. These affirm what might be deemed either an anecdotal or highly-controlled description in a single context as also a more general – and intersubjective – description of Blue as it is perceived and expressed across a variety of contexts. (These responses also provide variations on the class descriptions that are critical to the later phenomenological reduction and interpretation.)

196


Initially, my sophisticated graduate students tend not to answer the question ‘What did you see and hear?’ in terms of their sensual experience. Within the ‘naturalized attitude’ of film studies, they generally first respond with more abstract generic categorizations of Blue as a formally avant-garde and experimental work that tests the limits of cinema; or a part of Jarman’s ‘auteurist’ and multi-media oeuvre; or an introspective and poetic ‘diary’ film, charged with documentary realism by the fact of the filmmaker’s death; or an historically activist intervention in the public perception and treatment of those with AIDS. They rarely tell me, at first, what it was they actually saw and heard and how it was experienced as they saw and heard it. Furthermore, when prodded, they begin to describe Blue as not having any images, as an ‘unchanging’ rectangular visual field of bright and monochromatic cobalt that was difficult to watch (and also not to watch). Despite my question which involved sound, the students’ hierarchical emphasis is on the film as a visual phenomenon that (irritating or tedious to some) lacked anything visible to see. Sound is initially subordinated to the visible despite its prominent presence in Blue’s beginning audio-visual incantation: ‘You say to the boy open your eyes/When he opens his eyes and sees the light/You make him cry out. Saying/O Blue come forth/O Blue arise/O Blue ascend/O Blue come in.’ Students haven’t yet ‘horizontalized’ or ‘equalized’ all aspects of the film as it is first experienced. Indeed, as Philip Brophy (2008, p. 425) suggests of film studies’ general subordination of sound, the students’ initial response tended to focus on Blue’s ‘destabilized reprioritization of the aural [as if it were] a disability.’ This, of course, is not all that surprising. The course’s departmental name – ‘Visual Perception’ – inherently privileges vision over our other senses and thus continues the long-standing (if now often challenged) presupposition that film is primarily a visual medium. Nonetheless, this initial emphasis on visual ‘deprivation’ rather than sonic ‘plenty’ is also predominant outside the film studies classroom, appearing throughout mass media and viewer description of Blue in the visualist bias (and imprecision) of words such as ‘blank,’ ‘unchanging,’ ‘unwavering,’ ‘empty,’ ‘image-less,’ and ‘nothing to see.’ The movement from this ‘naturalized attitude’ into ‘careful’ seeing and listening challenges such description. Looking, for the moment, only (and at first) at what is visible both through and in the film’s visual perception (and, correlatively, the viewer’s), Blue does, indeed, provide an image – and it appears as insistently fulsome as it does insistently deprived. Certainly, as cultural phenomenologist Steve Connor (1998, p. 16) suggests, a ‘blank’ screen is often used to represent the nonvisual.


197

However, he continues, ‘as…Blue makes plain, blankness itself… projected on a screen, and…accompanied by sound, comes to have a kind of substance that can be shaped and inflected by other elements of the film experience. Blankness is not nonvisual, but is itself a certain visible content projected on to a screen.’ Watching Blue, we are not looking at a non-image, at ‘nothing’; rather, and more precisely, we are looking at an image of ‘no ‘‘thing’’’ – that is, at a referentially indeterminate but visible projection of a rectangular, bounded, and thus framed, bright blue visual field. Its chromatic fullness and containment prominent against the visible darkness surrounding the screen in front of us and centered in our visual field as we look at it, this visible image, this plenitude of blueness – particularly as qualified and transformed by Jarman’s sonorous invocations of the color as attached to different things, themes, and experiences – appears both literally and mutably as a ‘floating signifier’ not only for Jarman but also for the film and viewer. As Jarman intones on the soundtrack, ‘In the pandemonium of image/I present you with the Universal Blue…/An infinite possibility/becoming tangible.’ Even objectively, Blue is not image-less. Rather, it is figure-less. At this point, however, given its theatrical screening from a film print, a student will invariably point out that, in fact, Blue does have figures: the wear scratches (usually yellow and green) that appear and disappear on the cobalt field, and that move both independent of and in seeming relation to the soundtrack’s music. (One reviewer speaks of the film’s only visual ‘highlights’ as ‘imperfections in the film: a hair caught…in the projector lens, or a snow-like effect when the film changes reels’ [Howe, 1994, n.p.].) Although these figures are not intentional or significant in terms of the ‘text,’ they certainly are in the experience of the ‘film’ – for, at the very least, they visibly indicate spatial and temporal projection and movement. Once these visible artifacts are mentioned and not trivialized, the students’ description tends to become more reflexive – moving from Blue as a visible object to the film as a perceptual and somatic visual experience. Several students speak of seeing ‘after-images’ of geometric shapes when they redirected their eyes to the screen after looking away from it, these shapes briefly imposed on the blue field as the faint and partial outlines of squares or rectangles in hues of orange and green. One IMDB viewer writes: ‘You notice the tricks your eyes play on you. As you watch, your eyes become saturated with the color blue, and begin to try and compensate for the overstimulation, shifting to oranges, showing illusionary shapes in the blank field of the screen’ – this echoing Jarman, much later on the soundtrack, describing his own visual experience: ‘The shattering bright light of

198


the eye specialist’s camera leaves that empty sky blue after-image. Did I really see green the first time? The after-image dissolves in a second. As the photographs progress, colors change to pink and the light turns to orange.’ Students note also that alterations in their visual attention – narrow or diffuse focus, visual attentiveness or fatigue – modulate the blue to varying degrees of intensity and density. And, here, in reflexive description, the soundtrack becomes prominent and equal to the image: listening is horizontalized with seeing. Students begin describing various qualifications of the supposed unwavering ‘constancy’ of the blue image in their response to the music, sound effects, and specificity of Jarman’s narration. The tonal and affective qualities and the depth or flatness of the blue field change with the music (chimes, choral fragments, raucous punk) and sound effects (the interior of a coffee shop or a hospital waiting room). This mutability is most apparent in relation to Jarman’s varied evocations of ‘blueness’ in relation to his descriptions and memories: a ‘blue bottle buzzing,’ ‘a cobalt river,’ a ‘blue funk,’ ‘a sky blue butterfly,’ ‘azure seas,’ ‘the slow blue love of delphinium days,’ the ‘fathomless blue of Bliss.’ Thus, one reviewer writes: ‘As the…words modulate from plummy to morbid to bracingly obscene to ethereal, the blue on the screen seems to undulate with feeling – it alternately suggests a serene sky, a burnt retina, the chilliness of death, and, maybe, transcendence’ (Croce, n.d., n.p.). Although viewers/listeners do not project precise representations of Jarman’s objects of blueness onto the screen (or in their imaginations), Jarman’s contextualization (his ‘narrativization’) of the blue field before us ‘possibilizes’ it, aurally changing its perceived qualities and conjuring up, however diffuse and invisible, a nonetheless sonorously visual world. In this regard, phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard, whose The Poetics of Space (1958) will also be required reading, is apposite in suggesting that through the poetic image (here the visible blueness conjoined with Jarman’s aurally visual figurations) a ‘vibrating sonorous world’ emerges (1958, p. xiii) – this from a seemingly empty screen. And, quoting psychologist/phenomenologist Eugène Minkowski, he continues: ‘Here, to ‘fill up’ and ‘plenitude’…have a completely different sense. It is not a material object which fills another by espousing the form that the other imposes. No, it is the dynamism of sonorous life itself which…fills the…space, or better, the…world it assigns itself by its movement, making it reverberate, breathing into it its own life’ (Bachelard, 1958, p. xiii). In this regard, as one reviewer writes, ‘Instead of watching for colors, you listen to them’ (Howe, 1994, n.p.). This is particularly evident


199

in Jarman’s descriptions of yellow which, other than in occasional scratches on the film, never appears as such onscreen. Nonetheless, as many students note, we sense yellow when Jarman aurally figures it – against blue – as the ‘yellowbelly, slit-eye,’ color of disease and speaks of wilted sunflowers, ‘jaundiced corn,’ a ‘lemon goblin,’ a ‘jaundiced kiss,’ ‘mustard gas,’ ‘nicotined-stained fangs,’ ‘yellow bile,’ and ‘piss,’ Here students also begin to note the sensuality of Jarman’s voice. Critical to the impact of Jarman’s qualifying adjectives and descriptive scenes is what Roland Barthes (1972, p. 182) would call the ‘voluptuous soundsignifiers’ of its ‘grain.’ Indeed, rather than experienced as ‘voice-over’ narration (which suggests a detachment from the image), the tone, musicality, depth, and affective qualities of Jarman’s voice in-form both the objective ‘grain’ of the film and our own perceptual experience. Thus, in relation to the visible and immanent screen, even as his invisible and transcendent voice is charged with dialectical tension (both for him and for us), the present shifts of his cadence and tone – mellifluous, angry, grieving, poetic, observational, reflective, loving, satiric, ironic, resigned – and the screen together co-constitute a gestalt. In sum, it is Jarman’s voice that phenomenologically correlates the intended visual object with the modality in which it appears and is experienced. In this regard, students come to realize that, as Michel Chion writes in Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (1990, p. 91), the ‘aural field is much less limited or confined [than the visual field], its contours uncertain and changing.’ Film sound (to historically varying degree) surrounds and envelops us and is not, like the image, ‘in front’ of us. Merleau-Ponty (1961, p. 166) tells us: ‘To see is to have at a distance.’ To hear not only bridges that distance but also brings it near so that things resonate on and in our bodies. Although cooperative, as Brophy (2008, p.430) notes, ‘sight ‘displac[es]’ the self and hearing ‘incorporat[es]’ the self.’ Sound is also sensed as multidimensional, voluminous, ambient, as spatial and temporal. It provides a sense of situation and dimension to the things we see – and, in the case of Blue, those we don’t. Indeed, Blue’s intense insistence on the objective direction and limits of its visual field and the subjective (and enveloping) expansiveness of its aural field, its sonorous plenitude and figural deprivation, destabilize the dominant audiovisual hierarchy and resonate with Ihde’s comment in Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound (1976, p. 14) that ‘the whole realm of spoken and heard language must remain unsolvable so long as our seeing is not also a listening. It is to the invisible that listening may attend.’ Blue’s overall demand that listening attend to the invisible at the same time that seeing is engaged (for some, futilely) in prospection of

200


a non-normative visible object provokes extreme conditions of somatic attention that are valued both negatively and positively by those who experience the film. Some felt held captive to Blue, while others, ‘giving in’ to the film, were captivated by it; whichever the case, ‘adjusting’ to the experience was difficult and remarked upon. Indeed, this difficulty and the correspondent tendency to displace their vision from the screen and then invariably return to it is emphasized not only by my students but by almost everyone else – and this primarily in reflexive terms of physical response and its related affects. One reviewer writes that Blue ‘can get dizzying, nauseating or hypnotic – depending on your sensory makeup or your attitude toward visual deprivation…. You may retreat to the more comforting darkness at your feet’ (Howe, 1994 n.p.). And an IMDB viewer posts: ‘After a few minutes I felt angry, annoyed at having to stare at a screen of blue. I tried looking at the floor, closing my eyes, anything to avoid the blue. But I kept looking back.’ Indeed, ‘boredom,’ ‘frustration,’ and ‘tedium’ emerge as frequent negative descriptors of this experience, these often couched in expressions of anger at the film – as a film. One IMDB poster writes: ‘To stare at a blue screen…for 79 minutes while people talk over it is entirely pointless and frustrating…. This is literally the worst film I have ever seen. In fact, I hate calling it a film because it isn’t.’ Positive responses also emphasize the film’s physical demands but their valuation of the experience is quite different. One IMDB posting reads: ‘Amazingly rich. Jarman has created the closest movie experience to a director talking to the inside of your head. The concomitant feel of terrifying hallucination and control-losing peace…provides an extraordinary experience…of letting go and getting lost.’ And a reviewer writes: ‘Jarman evokes a sense of journey within the viewer, and the effect is hypnotic and moving…. Once your eyes return to the corporeal world, it’s as though sight has been restored’ (Haynes, n.d., n.p.). Another agrees: ‘You may sit through Blue with nothing to see, but leave it rich with images’ (Howe, 1994, n.d.). Indeed, what cuts across these often polarized (but also often ambivalent) descriptions is their reflexive emphasis on the viewer/listener’s lived-body and its material, immanent, presence to the film. It is in recognition of this invariant structural feature of Blue that we move from phenomenological description (in existence never complete or ‘finished’) to phenomenological reduction (or thematization) – and Ihde’s fourth hermeneutic rule: ‘Seek out structural or invariant features of the phenomena’ as they appear (1979, 39). To assist us in this task is variational method which, Ihde writes (1979, 40), ‘requires obtaining


201

as many sufficient examples or variations upon examples as might be necessary to discover the structural features being sought.’ These variations ‘‘possibilize’ phenomena,’ bringing forward ‘the invariants in variants’ and also determining ‘the limits of a phenomenon.’ Through comparison with other phenomena like and unlike it, a general (albeit not universal) shape or pattern of Blue and its experience emerges – a shape we’ve in many ways already discovered but which has not yet been made explicit as to its structural features: these including, as a major example, the perceptual fact that Blue’s synthetic gestalt – as a film – is constituted both intra- and intersubjectively in – and by – its general structure as a dialectic between image and sound, seeing and hearing. It is important to note Ihde’s requirement that we obtain a range of ‘sufficient’ examples or variations. Sufficiency here does not refer to the quantity of examples but to the ‘whatness’ rather than the ‘thatness’ of Blue. The necessary conditions that constitute Blue as a film would seem not to be at issue then. And yet, in the phenomenological reduction, an unsettling paradox emerges as itself an invariant structural feature of the film: the particular dialectic presented and synthesized by Blue’s sufficiency as what it is foregrounds the general question of the cinema’s necessary conditions for its existence as such. Hence the question of Blue’s ‘filmness’ – this usually raised by angry or frustrated viewers. Given that Blue as a film structurally generates this question, it cannot be avoided – and here we have some help from Jarman himself. Indeed, Blue found its cinematic form through a set of phenomenological variations of its first-person narrative content (another structural invariant) that provide the seminar with a range of ‘possibilities.’ Versions of Blue include a performance piece; a written text; a multimedia event shown on British television with accompanying sound on radio; a theatrically-released film; an audio CD; VHS and DVD releases of the film; and even a gallery installation. As the class considers these possibilities, the film-ness of the film and the sensual plenitude of the film experience become explicit. We have already identified experience of the film as a synthetic (if also enigmatic) gestalt of projected and framed image and sound. Furthermore, the ‘grain’ of the film and objective artifacts on the filmstrip indicate cinematic movement as not only audible through the temporal stream that is the soundtrack but also visible – differentiating it in degree from its ‘cleaner’ DVD exhibition and certainly in structure from a projected blue slide. Unlike a slide, then, the film is experienced as a temporal phenomenon. Thus, some viewers are disgruntled that ‘nothing visibly happens,’ but they are disgruntled

202


within the structure of a particular and invariant experience of temporal expectation that would not be present if they were looking at a slide, or reading a written text at their own pace, or listening to an audio-only CD. All these entail spatiality and temporality in different modalities and frames of provocation and experience. Indeed, even the theatrical space constructed for film-going provides generally invariant viewing conditions – at least to the extent that Blue is isolated in darkness and audiovisually privileged in space. Our (provisionally) last variation is a thought-experiment: Would Blue be what it is if it provided visible representation – perhaps a dramatization of Jarman’s experiences or something more figurally abstract? As they explore this ‘possibilization,’ students come to realize the significance of Jarman’s radical refusal of representation and move toward phenomenological interpretation. Unlike viewers who question Blue’s ‘film-ness’ because it lacks representations or figures, my students understand this lack as a formal choice and thus a salient property of the film and its experience. As Noël Carroll (1998, pp. 324–5) writes, questioning the ‘essence’ of cinema, certain films ‘present visual stimulation to audiences with the intention of eliciting certain perceptual states, toying with the spectator’s perceptual apparatus directly rather than via ‘mediated’ representations.’ If Blue had characters and dialogue, students realize that their attention would be intentionally-directed ‘elsewhere’ and ‘elsewhen’ – toward the mediating bodies (and their voices) on the screen rather than their own immanent ‘here’ and ‘now’ in the darkened theater aware not only of the ‘floating signifiers’ of the blue screen, Jarman’s voice, and music, but also, and reflexively, of their own lived-bodies. Furthermore, specific representations would overdetermine the phenomenological shape of attention. That is, not only would the viewer/listener’s intense sense of their lived-body’s material immanence (whether experienced negatively and/or positively) be greatly diminished but also diminished would be the film’s invitation (whether accepted or not) to transcendence – to perceptive and expressive acts of imagination, reverie, and thought that, in dynamic concert with the blue screen and Jarman’s own voiced imagination, reverie, and thought, are rooted in our lived-body’s immanence but also exceed its corporeal limits. Thus, although experiencing Blue in a representational (rather than presentational) mode might be less physically discomfiting, the possibility of ‘losing oneself’ in Jarman’s ‘fathomless blue of Bliss’ would be lessened. Alternatively, if Blue were figurally abstract rather than representational, Jarman’s voice and the music would remain prominent in


203

experience. Nonetheless, we would still be intentionally-directed toward the kinetic figures onscreen, these underdetermined and ambiguously located not only ‘elsewhere’ but also ‘now’ because of their abstraction. Given the figures’ ambiguity, however, both our awareness of our own immanence as well as our transcendent acts of imagination would be less physically self-reflexive than they are with Blue as it is. Rather, we would be engaged (to varying degree) with either ‘making sense’ (however vaguely) of the figures onscreen in relation to the content of Jarman’s voice or be engaged in a distracted (rather than explicitly reflexive) form of sensuous reverie in relation to the musicality of the soundtrack. Students realize that, in both these variations, their intense awareness of their own lived-bodies in the ‘here’ and ‘now’ would be diminished – as would their awareness in immanence of their own transcendent acts of consciousness. Correlatively, their sense of Jarman’s persona – his invisible and transcendent presence embodied through voice – would not be as intense. That is, however invisible, Jarman is embodied and insistently present, the terribly consequential content of his (posthumously-heard) voice indexically connected to his corporeal existence and mortality. Barthes (1972, p. 182) writes: ‘The ‘grain’ [of the voice] is that: the materiality of the body speaking.’ Thus, as Alison Young (2003, p. 344) writes of Blue: ‘The moving image inscribes the other [not only] in the ear [but also] on the body of the spectator.’ In sum, variational method reveals that an embodied sense of immanent presentness and presence as well as an embodied sense of transcendence are structural invariants of Blue as the film and experience it is (or can be) – and this in relation not only to the viewer/listener but also to the film object and Jarman, the filmmaker. This insight brings us to phenomenological interpretation and Ihde’s fifth and last hermeneutic rule: ‘Every experiencing has its reference or direction towards what is experienced, and, contrarily, every experienced phenomenon refers to or reflects a mode of experiencing to which it is present’ (1979, pp. 42–3). Here, the meaning of the phenomenon, as it is intentionally and significantly lived, is specified through the correlation of the previous description and reduction. In some ways, we have been doing this all along – and, indeed, from the beginning. It is not as if Blue had no meaning or value prior to phenomenological inquiry. This meaning, however, was intuitive and summary. The task of phenomenological method was both to ‘unpack’ it as constituted, lived, and given value – and then to expand its horizons and possibilities. Focus in the phenomenological interpretation is thus on the synthetic correlation of consciousness and

204


its object in a lived body-subject as it is, at once, particular in experience and general in structure. This incorporates (and I do not use the word loosely) both the symmetrical relation of consciousness and its object in experience and also its asymmetry. Thus, along with the symmetry between them, we also recognize that Blue’s viewer/listener and Jarman have a radically different material and consequential experience in terms of their respective forms of visual deprivation and bodily dis-ease. Nonetheless, in their entailment with Blue, both intra- and intersubjectively share the experiential structure, shape, and temporality of sensual deprivation – as well as a reflexive and enhanced sensual awareness of both the richness and fragility of material existence. As Ben BennettCarpenter (2008, p. 188) writes, the film ‘provoke[s] experience [of] one’s own materiality in a sort of carnal sublime.’ Ihde’s last hermeneutic rule thus leads us, in the face of Blue, to the affecting and sensual discovery of the lived-body subject being-in-theworld not only as object and subject, visible and invisible, immanent and transcendent, as intersubjective yet fundamentally grounded in our own and the world’s materiality. Interpreting Blue, Patrizia Lombardo (1994, p. 133) is eloquent: ‘With a violent leap, the most bodyless film ever produced projects the human body in its most cruel and unspeakable presence: pain, illness, suffering, at the borderline between the physical and the mental, the conscious and the unconscious, life and death.’ As we have seen, however, the human body projected by Blue is not only cruel and ‘unspeakable.’ Indeed, Jarman’s body also serves – in the film experience – as the immanent ground of a benediction in its breathing and speaking presence: distilling, giving poignant life to, and affirming the transcendence of what Bachelard has called our ‘sonority of being’ (1958, p. xii). Blind and looking at death, insisting on bodily immanence and transcendence, Jarman thus creates – through Blue’s sensuous dialectic and its synthesis – a privileged space and time that provokes from the still living bodies before it not only reflexive selfawareness but also the conditions for ethical thought and care. In sum, phenomenological method ‘fleshes out’ our initial interpretations and reveals that Blue is not only objectively about the richness, complexity, and sensuality of audiovisual perception (as well as the pain of its diminishment and loss). It also, and more fundamentally, reveals that Blue is performative: through its seeming ‘minimalism,’ subjectively constituting for its viewers/listeners a meaningful experience of extreme self-reflection on the dynamics, habits, creativity, and plenitude of their own embodied perception. Certainly, much more can be said about Blue in relation to its historical and cultural context; its generic


205

status; its aesthetic, thematic, and social significance; and its place in the filmmaker’s oeuvre. In this regard, phenomenology does not dismiss the importance of culture, history, aesthetics, and ideology. As a ‘first philosophy,’ however, what phenomenology demands is that we not rush to interpretation and judgment but attend, first, to the actual and possible embodied experience that grounds Blue’s meaning not only as it is thought but also as it is perceived.

References Bachelard, G., 1958. The Poetics of Space. Translated from French by Maria Jolas 1964. Boston: Beacon Press. Barthes, R., 1972. ‘The grain of the voice.’ In: Image–Music–Text. Translated from French by S. Heath 1977. New York: Hill & Wang, pp. 179–89. Bennett-C. B., 2008. ‘Moving memento mori pictures: documentary, mortality, and transformation in three films.’ PhD Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America. Blue, 1993. [Film] Written and directed by D. Jarman. UK: Channel 4 in association with The Arts Council of Great Britain, Opal, BBC Radio 3, and Zeitgeist. Brophy, P., 2008. ‘Where sound is: locating the absent aural in film theory.’ In: James D. and M. Renov, eds, The Sage Handbook of Film Studies. London: Sage, pp. 424–35. Carroll, N., 1998. ‘The essence of cinema.’ Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, 89 (2/3), pp. 323–330. Chion, M., 1990. Audio-vision: Sound on Screen. Edited and translated from French by C. Gorbman 1994. New York: Columbia University Press. Connor, S., 1998. Fascination, skin and the screen. Critical Quarterly, 40 (1), pp. 9–24. Croce, F., n.d. DVD review of Blue. Cinepassion [online] Available at http://www. cinepassion.org/reviews/b/Blue.html [Accessed 11 November 2009]. Haynes, P., n.d. DVD review of Blue. DVD Beaver [online]. Available at http://www. dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDreviews26/blue.htm [Access 11 November 2009]. Howe, D., 1994. Review of Blue. Washington Post [online] 11 February. Available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/videos/ bluenrhowe_a0b031.htm [Accessed 11 November 2009]. Ihde, D., 1976. Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound. Athens: Ohio University Press. —— 1979. Experimental Phenomenology: An Introduction. New York: Paragon Books. Internet Movie Data Base. Available at http://imdb.com Lombardo, P., 1994. ‘Cruellement Bleu.’ Critical Quarterly, 36 (1): 131–3. Merleau-Ponty, M., 1946. ‘The primacy of perception.’ In: The Primacy of Perception. Translated from French and edited by J. M. Edie 1964. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 12–42. —— 1947. ‘The film and the new psychology.’ In: Sense and non-sense. Translated from French by H. L. D. and P. A. Dreyfus 1964. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 48–59.

206


—— 1961. ‘Eye and mind.’ In: The Primacy of Perception. Translated from French and edited by J. M. Edie 1964. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 159–90. Sobchack, V., 1992. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Young, A., 2003. ‘Into the blue: the image written on law.’ In: A. Sarat and J. Simon, eds. 2003. Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies, and the Law: Moving Beyond Legal Realism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 327–51.

12 Serious Men: The Films of the Coen Brothers as Ethics Julian Baggini

Ever since I first stumbled across the idea of film as philosophy, I have been excited by it. It seems to me that films can ‘think seriously and systematically ... in just the ways that philosophers do,’ as Stephen Mulhall put it (Mulhall, 2002, p2). How it can do so, however, turns out to be very hard to pin down. Reflecting on this forces us to think more clearly about how philosophy normally does philosophy in the first place. If the idea of film as philosophy is problematic, then the philosophy part is at least as troublesome as the film component. Broad metaphilosophical reflection is especially difficult because different schools and traditions use different methods, and even within schools there can be wide disagreement about methodological issues. However, one philosophical technique which is almost universal is the method of using paradigmatic examples as a means of illuminating the issue under consideration. So it is that I’m going to use the films of the Coen Brothers both as an example of real and worthwhile film as philosophy, as well as a means of trying to say something about what film as philosophy in general can involve. Before I begin, however, there are some obvious differences between philosophical texts and films that need to be fully appreciated, if the task of seeing film as philosophy is not going to be hopelessly misguided from the start. Philosophical texts have certain characteristics that do not appear to be shared with films. Unless we have a particular reason to think otherwise, the works of a philosopher, in order to be understood, have to be assumed to be intentional attempts to create a coherent and truthful account of the phenomena under discussion. Even if we accept that we can never know the author’s intentions, we have to adopt what Dennett calls an intentional stance (see Dennett, 1989), reading texts as though they were 207

208


the product of conscious intention. This means that apparent contradictions over time and within texts need to be treated as either failings or anomalies in need of explanation. So, for instance, an account is required of the relation between late and early Wittgenstein, Hume’s apparently contradictory accounts of causation, or Plato’s apparent contradictions in his writings about the soul. Furthermore, we expect these intentional attempts to offer reasons in support of their conclusions, reasons that all can assess. This account of philosophy as an intentional, reason-giving attempt at a consistent and coherent picture of the world, or at least a part of it, is a very minimalist one, one which is neutral on numerous contentious issues, such as the role of a priori reasoning, the possibility of truth, and the importance of deductive validity. At first sight, the works of a filmmaker need have none of these characteristics. A film is not a philosophical treatise, and a filmmaker is not a philosopher. It is the case that most filmmakers at least seem to have an interest in truthfulness, but often this is limited to the truthfulness of a particular situation or of the universe of the film, which may be quite different to that of the one we live in. Filmmakers need have no interest at all in maintaining a coherence and consistency of world-view, within any particular film but especially over a body of work. As Ethan Coen said in an interview (Fargo DVD extra): ‘As far as we’re concerned what we’re trying to do is just something different from what we’ve done before, each time out. … To the extent that there’s anything that the movies have in common, we’re not aware of it.’ Indeed, many filmmakers relish showing the contradictions and paradoxes of life, and have no interest in giving a coherent account which explains how they can co-exist. A filmmaker may simply try to see the world from different perspectives in different films. If that makes the world-views of each incompatible, there is no interpretative problem. Differences in apparent world-views expressed by films are interesting and worthy of discussion, but we do not and should not expect the same consistency in a filmmaker as we do a philosopher. To interpret a film or oeuvre as though it were an intentional expression of a systematic way of thinking would also almost always be misguided. This dissimilarity between film and philosophy is perhaps disguised by the fact that in the world of film (and literary) theory, the intentional fallacy is often assumed. That is to say, the idea that authorial intention is important to understanding a work is considered laughably naïve, since we can never know what such intentions are, and in any case,

Serious Men: The Films of the Coen Brothers as Ethics 209

once created, a work of art has a life and logic of its own. This, however, has not signalled an abandonment of the intentional stance. Rather, the work is treated as though it were its own author: the critic or theorist looks at what the work says, and if the author denies intending any such thing, that is besides the point. In the case of film, it is the films that think philosophically, not the filmmakers. Although one could read philosophical texts in this way (and some do), in general, most would accept, I think, that there is a difference between reading philosophy as the intentional work of an author and adopting the intentional stance towards a film or oeuvre. To think of a film as being a kind of mind of its own (in a similar way to how Daniel Frampton does; see Frampton, 2006) may be a useful fiction, but it could lead us horribly astray if we took the metaphor too literally. Finally, films are not obviously in the business of reason-giving. Most of the time, the only reasons we are offered for accepting the filmmaker’s world-view (should one be offered) is simply that we find ourselves in agreement with its presentation. These deep differences between the modus operandi of film-makers and philosophers may appear to render Mulhalls’ claim that films think seriously and systematically ‘in just the ways that philosophers do’ a non-starter. However, it is possible to allow for real differences between film and philosophy and still be left with enough in common to sustain the claim that film can philosophise. First, we should set aside the idea of intention. Don’t even take an intentional stance. Films may show or tell us things, but it is never necessary and often misguided to think of them or their makers as trying to do so. Second, loosen the consistency condition. Any ideas of philosophical interest that we can find in films must have at least a local coherence and consistency, but there is no reason to expect them to hang together with others within a film or across an oeuvre. In general, film is better suited to making critical philosophical interventions, shifting the way we look at things, than it is to presenting a fully worked-through philosophical system. This is why a weaker consistency condition is not a weakness of film as philosophy. What we’re left with then is the idea that film, like philosophy, can offer a reason-giving way of seeing the world truthfully and (locally) coherently. The latter part of this proposition seems uncontroversial. But where does reason-giving come into this? Without that feature, surely nothing can be philosophy? I think that films do offer reasons to accept their visions of reality, ones that are not so different from many more conventional philosophical reasons. To explain

210


this, we need to think of films as showing rather than telling. What does this mean? First, and more straightforwardly, whatever filmphilosophising is, it is not (usually at least) a collection of dramatised syllogisms. Any truths it reveals are shown not told. Second, and more significantly, this kind of showing is something that standard philosophy does too, with words alone rather than words and images. Even many of the most important ‘arguments’ in philosophy are no such thing. Rather, they are simply attempts by the philosopher to draw attention to an aspect of a phenomenon, inviting the reader to ‘see’ for themselves what it is they are talking about. Descartes’ cogito argument in the Meditations, for instance, is not an argument at all: it has no premises and no conclusion. It is simply an observation that ‘I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me, or conceived in my mind’ (Descartes, 1986, p. 17). Films show in a similar way. If compelling, we simply see that they accurately capture something important about the world, in just the way we see that Descartes’ proposition has captured something about the nature of first-person experience. Of course, we should be able to then explain why it is accurate, so it is not simply a matter of judgement without justification. And like standard philosophical texts, to really test the worldview presented in a film, we need to examine it both rationally and empirically. But as with many accurate descriptions, the best test of whether it is accurate is that we look at what is being described and at the description and see whether they match. For example, what allows us to judge that a portrait is a good likeness? We can verbalise the reasons: it gets the chin right, the expression is spot on, and so on; but in each case what we are describing is something we know to be true because we observe it, not because we deduce it. Attending and noticing can be more philosophically critical than arguing soundly from premises to conclusion. In approaching the films of the Coens as philosophy, we are not therefore demanding a consistent and coherent vision across their movies, although as a matter of fact, I do think that there is indeed some consistency across their films, and some development. That means that scenes, characters or plots that contradict the ideas I am going to bring out do not stand as refutations of the authentic existence of these ideas in the films. All we are looking for are ways of seeing the world which enrich our philosophical understanding of it, and which provide reasons for accepting those ways of seeing as truthful.


That Barton Fink feeling Stephen Mulhall writes: There is a strong philosophical tendency to think of moral disagreement on the model of opposing opinions about a particular course of action, with each opinion supported by more general ethical principles. But as the example of Socrates and the polis implies, moral disagreement can also be a matter of differing visions of what matters in human life, different conceptions of human flourishing in the world, and so on; and discussion here may well take the form of encouraging one’s interlocutor not so much to change her mind about a particular course of action but to look at everything differently – and so to find moral significance where it did not previously seem to exist, as well as to find that what previously seemed highly morally significant was in fact trivial or even essentially illusory. (Mulhall, 2007, pp.279–94) This seems to be exactly right, and it provides an explanation of how films can do moral philosophy in a way which is both distinctive to that of formal philosophy, while at the same time being just the same kind of thing as it. The films of the Coen Brothers are for me paradigmatic examples of this at work. The moral vision they contain is not remotely theoretical. In fact, there’s a great dig at the idea that true morality requires a theoretical framework or a system in The Big Lebowski (Joel Coen, USA, 1998), when Walter says, ‘Say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.’ Before talking about their oeuvre in general, I’d like to spend some time looking at one of their films, Barton Fink (Joel Coen, USA, 1991). Because it is about a screenwriter, it is not fanciful to suppose the film has something to say about how the Coens view their own work as filmmakers, but it’s a supposition I’ll manage without. It might help to start with an outline of what I think Barton Fink shows us about ethics. If this question could be answered adequately in prose, then there would be little of distinctive philosophical value in the film. This is another problem film as philosophy routinely encounters: if film has something distinctive to contribute philosophically, then those contributions cannot be translated into prose without loss; but if that is true, how does one write about film as philosophy? The answer is that, just as film invites us to attend to aspects of an issue of philosophical importance that are not as clear in other media, so writing about films

212


can help us to attend to those aspects of the films. The whole exercise of both film as philosophy and writing about it therefore becomes one of a particular kind of attending, rather than arguing. This may make it sound more meditative than rational, but as I have suggested, I think that more standard philosophy is of this kind than is often recognised anyway. So, to ask the question in a modified form: what aspects of the ethical does Barton Fink invite us to attend to, so that by doing so we might better understand what it is to live ethically? The crude summary is that empathy and understanding are more important to ethics than theory and ideas. Thus summarised, the message sounds trite, but that is no objection against it. After all, it sounds less trite to me than summaries of other ethical positions: do what makes more people happier; do your duty; do unto others as you would be done by. The richness is in the observation of the reality of living the message, not in its bland statement. Fink is a man whose lack of empathy and understanding is almost total. At one point, Audrey tells him, ‘Barton, empathy requires understanding.’ ‘What don’t I understand?’ he replies. This is a rhetorical question from the point of view of the film, since the answer is more or less everything. Take, for instance, ‘the common man’. Fink, like many artists and intellectuals before and since, claims a moral cache for his art, because it is ‘a new, living theatre of, about, and for the common man’. What the action of the film shows us, however, is that Fink has no feeling for the common man at all. It certainly isn’t by him, and it doesn’t seem to be for him either. The low-paid stagehands are certainly not at all moved by his drama: they stand around reading newspapers, unconcerned. In what becomes a running gag, Fink’s ersatz way of being ‘normal’ is to have fish sellers as characters. When he does relate personally to ‘common men’ he patronises them, as he does the travelling salesman, Charlie, when he says, ‘Strange as it may seem, Charlie, I guess I write about people like you. The average working stiff. The common man.’ Or when he says, ‘To put it in your language, theatre becomes as phoney as a three dollar bill.’ (My emphasis.) Or again when he says ‘The hopes and dreams of the common man are as noble as those of any king,’ which is at the same time romanticising (since the common man is not always noble) and patronising (since who would have thought his dreams could not be so noble?). A key image here is the picture of the girl on the beach in Fink’s hotel room. It’s the kind of Athena print cliché that it always dismissed by the


cognoscenti. (It reminded me of a Jack Vettriano painting. Vettriano’s is an art by, of and for the common man, despised by the cultural elite.) But, of course, the last shot of Barton Fink recreates the picture perfectly. The message seems pretty clear to me: so-called low art can reflect life too, perhaps more accurately then high art. Don’t despise it. You cannot claim to care for and love ‘the common man’ if you junk everything that is valued by him. You certainly need to accept he likes films like Beery’s wrestling pictures. Indeed, you might also accept that there is some merit in two commercial films the Coens shot from other people’s scripts: Intolerable Cruelty (Joel Coen, USA, 2003) and the remake of The Ladykillers (Joel and Ethan Coen, USA, 2004), both largely unloved by fans and critics. This is not just a matter of harmless snobbery. The preciousness of the cultural elite is also a target of an acutely pointed accusation levelled at Fink by Muntz (Charlie’s real name): C’mon Barton, you think you know about pain? You think I made your life hell? Take a look around this dump. You’re just a tourist with a typewriter, Barton. I live here. Don’t you understand that? And you come into my home, and you complain that I’m making too ... much ... noise. This is what cultural elites do: they go into the home of the ‘common man’ and find noise: tabloid newspapers, Big Brother, Sky TV, soap operas. But they are just tourists with word processors. Empathy requires understanding and they have no understanding at all of what it is to live this kind of life. And that is a moral failing, because morality requires empathy and understanding. Fink is morally flawed, because he doesn’t actually recognise the humanity of others. He talks of ‘the common man’ but that’s just a distorted abstraction in his own head. Also, as Audrey detects, he is quick to judge others. ‘Don’t judge him, Barton,’ she says, referring to Mayhew, a once serious author who is now an alcoholic Hollywood screenwriter. ‘Don’t condescend to him.’ This is what he always does: judges, condescends. He actually seems to despise most of the people he allows himself to judge, especially if they are not ‘common’. ‘Jesus, Garland, you left me alone with those people,’ he says of two wellhealed people he has to have a drink with. Audrey is a better person because she offers understanding, not a formalised understanding of people as though they were rational, disembodied Cartesian egos, but a human understanding of people as

214


frail, flesh and blood people. ‘I helped Bill [Mayhew] most by appreciating him, by understanding him,’ she says. ‘We all need understanding, Barton. Even you, tonight, it’s all you really need.’ The understanding she then offers is not intellectual, but intimate, emotional, sexual. Into this picture, we have to locate the disturbing figure of Muntz, a travelling salesman who, it turns out, is also a serial killer. Like an apocalyptic angel, he delivers judgement on Fink. What is chilling is that, despite his wickedness, Muntz actually does seem to be right in his condemnation of Fink. In some ways, he is even a better person. He certainly has a sense of humility that Barton demonstrably lacks: ‘I wouldn’t be much of a match for you at mental gymnastics’, he says. More to the point, however, is his sense of empathy, something which psychopaths are usually said to lack. However, with Muntz, it is more complicated than this, as his justificatory speech shows: Most guys I just feel sorry for. Yeah. It tears me up inside, to think about what they’re going through. How trapped they are. I understand it. I feel for ‘em. So I try and help them out. Jesus. Yeah. I know what it feels like, when things get all balled up at the head office. It puts you through hell, Barton. So I help people out. I just wish someone would do as much for me. What Muntz shows is that the kind of empathy that forms the basis of good ethics is certainly not simplistic. Muntz feels his own pain and can also sense it in others. But he projects his own inability to cope onto others: he fails to see things from the point of view of his victims. Sure, they’re in pain, but unlike him they don’t want someone to put them out of their misery. Pain is life. Audrey said ‘empathy requires understanding’, but what Muntz has is empathy without understanding, and that is morally very dangerous indeed. It is what leads to misplaced attempts to, as Muntz puts it, ‘help people out’, by putting them out of their perceived misery. Empathy without understanding could even be more perilous than the absence of both, which Fink seems to manifest. This failing, however, is not simply a result of Fink’s dispositions. The most damning judgement on Fink is delivered by Muntz in response to Fink’s plea, ‘But Charlie – why me? Why–’ Muntz interrupts, ‘Because you don’t listen!’ To not listen may not appear to be the greatest sin, but it is in fact deeply connected to the root of much evil. How can you empathise or understand others if you don’t listen? To not listen is to not extend a basic civility which fully recognises the humanity of others, to act


precisely in such a way that leads to evil, because it dehumanises. And dehumanisation has been the mechanism which psychologists generally accept to be the prerequisite for the most appalling evils human shave inflicted on each other, from Auschwitz to Rwanda (see Taylor, 2009). It is probably not coincidental that the Second World War is breaking out at the time Barton Fink is set. Similarly, The Big Lebowski is set at the time of the First Gulf War. Although not overtly political, a link seems to be suggested here, and perhaps that is that great conflicts, killing and bloodshed stem from the same kind of failure to listen, to acknowledge the human in others, as we see in the small lives of the film’s characters. There are, of course, philosophical precedents for the moral insights offered by Barton Fink, most obviously Aristotle’s emphasis on character, Hume and Smith’s stress on moral sentiment, and Levinas’s ethics of the other. But the film does more than illustrate these theories: it shows in a more real way how the insights are actually true. And in being nontheoretical it actually expresses the non-theoretical nature of the truth better. In particular, it shows that having empathy is not enough. How we use it is critical. What we are shown throughout the film is the priority of right feeling towards others over noble, intellectual intentions. Right feeling, however, is not simply an ability to feel another’s pain. Empathy requires understanding. This insight is not, and should not, be formalised into a moral theory. As an observation, it certainly leaves questions unanswered, in particular the precise ways in which thought and feeling should interact. But its value as a philosophical intervention is not in its theoretical completeness, but in its power to make us attend to what complete, neat theories often miss.

Taking it easy for all us sinners This reading of Barton Fink is consistent with a recurring ethical theme in the films of the Coen Brothers: that the difference between the good and the bad is not usually to be found in huge differences in character, but in small ones. In several films, in addition to the good and the bad, there is the grossly ugly: psychopaths and sociopaths who are not just ordinary people gone wrong, but individuals lacking some basic moral sense. But the ethically and psychologically interesting characters are those who are not fundamentally ‘evil’, but those who give in to selfish desires. The capacity to resist small temptations therefore becomes the hallmark of moral goodness. Time and again, the good are not heroes but just

216


ordinary people who uphold basic decency. Hannah Arendt talked about the banality of evil, but the Coens show the banality of good. The recurring theme is the fragility of an ordinary decency which recognises the humanity in others. When this breaks, all hell is let loose. To be good is really no more than to be able to resist the many temptations to be bad, and this is not essentially a calculative matter: it is not about having the right moral theory and applying it. Fargo (Joel Coen, USA, 1996) provides the clearest example of this. Marge and Norm are the two heroes of this piece and they are two of the most ordinary people you could imagine. In a film full of crooks and bad-types, what marks these two out as good? Nothing remotely saint like at all. Norm gets up to make Marge eggs when she is called out early. They tell each other that they love each other. Their lives are full of such small kindnesses, offered without fanfare. They are also quite simple people. For instance, Marge doesn’t really even understand evil. Taking one of the captured killers to the police station, she wonders aloud to him why on earth he did what he did: ‘And for what? For a little bit of money. There’s more to life than money, you know. Don’t you know that? And here ya are, and it’s a beautiful day.’ In contrast, take Jerome (Jerry) Lundegaard. All the carnage and hurt that occurs in the film is a consequence of his misconceived plan to stage a kidnapping of his wife to extract a ransom from her father, a wealthy man who doesn’t think Jerry is good enough for his daughter. Jerry has clearly been trying for some time to maintain a certain standard of living for his family which his job as a car salesman cannot sustain. Some creative accounting has allowed him to get hold of some money fraudulently, but the credit company are catching up with him. Jerry’s plight would be readily recognised by psychologists and criminologists. By small steps, he ends up moving from a small pretence, to a large fraud, to a major criminal act. Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist who staged the notorious Stanford Prison Experiment, warns that it is just by such incremental steps that ordinary people end up doing wicked things (Zimbardo, 2008). In this case, Jerry’s hired hands end up shooting a policeman and two witnesses to that homicide. And one then ends up killing the other. Jerry was not an evil man, but his willingness to cross a line led to events spiralling out of control. Marge and Norm, in contrast, are moral examples because they simply do the right thing, and do not even consider crossing the line, even in small matters. Their praiseworthy life is such because it is a blameless life, not because it contains any acts of great bravery or charity. Simply maintaining that in what is a harsh world is achievement enough.


All around them, people are struggling with loneliness, the weight of expectation or temptation. So at the end of the film, Marge is quite right when, sitting in bed with Norm, reading and with no great conversation or passion, she says, ‘Heck, Norm, you know, we’re doin’ pretty good.’ The Dude in The Big Lebowski is another example of a character who is some kind of moral exemplar, despite many obvious failings. As the stranger says in the introductory voice-over, ‘Sometimes there’s a man – won’t say a hero, ‘cause what’s a hero? – but sometimes there’s a man...’ and so he rambles on, unable to say anything more substantive. But the Dude himself later comes up with something better: ‘The Dude abides.’ He’s no great hero but he resists the greed, anger and desire that corrupts others around him: the nihilists who try to blackmail him (an attempt which, as in Barton Fink, Fargo and The Man Who Wasn’t There results in death), the trophy wife whose selfishness causes pain and trouble to those around her, the bowler Jesus whose arrogance turns what should be fun into a nasty personal conflict. Perhaps the greatest contrast is with George Bush Snr. and Saddam Hussain, Saddam with his aggression and Bush with his insistence, seen on a television in the film’s first scene, insisting that ‘This aggression will not stand. This will not stand!’ The political parallels may be a little naïve, but the idea that the world would be a better place if more people simple ‘abided’, like the Dude, is not a fanciful one. As the stranger says at the end of the film, ‘It’s good knowin’ he’s out there, the Dude, takin’ her easy for all us sinners.’ Sinners like Ed in The Man Who Wasn’t There (Joel Coen, USA, 2001). Like Jerry in Fargo, he’s an ordinary guy sucked into killing by small steps, by nothing more than the desire to have a bit more than he does. Only a certain disgruntlement separates him from Marge and Norm, making him unable to simply abide. Almost every film repeats the basic ethical motif of the ordinary person who gives into a temptation, unleashing hell. Moss does it in No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, USA, 2007). He discovers the scene of carnage after what appears to be a drug deal gone wrong. He then finds a suitcase with about $2 million in it. He takes it and hides it, leaving behind one survivor, who begs him for water he doesn’t have. This is hardly an appalling moral act. The money belonged to less honest people than him, and living in a trailer, he could certainly use it. But as he walks away, thunder rumbles overhead, rather unsubtly warning us that he has already unleashed dark forces beyond his control. And yet he may have got away with it, had he not returned to the scene later, plagued with guilt for not giving the injured man water.

218


What follows is multiple murder. As the sociopath Anton pursues him to reclaim his money, numerous innocent people are killed. For this, ultimate blame rests with Anton. Yet in his entirely understandable decision to take the money, Moss has already made the fatal moral compromise. His choice implicates him in a world where ordinary moral norms do not apply. He stepped over a line, barely by an inch, but that was enough. There’s a vital moral insight here. Moral reasoning typically centres on duties, character or consequences. Moss’s case involves all three, but he does not seem to be seriously morally defective by any measure. He has a duty to inform the authorities, but he also has a duty to provide for his partner, and also to keep her safe. In retrospect, it’s easy to see which duty should have held sway, but it is not obvious that he erred. In terms of his character, he was perhaps a little greedy, but he did not do anything terribly wrong to acquire the money. And in terms of consequences, it was very hard to see that they would be so bad, when they could have been so very good indeed. What the action of the film shows, I think, is that duties, character and consequences are all important, but it is foolish to think we can calculate their precise weight. Indeed, the point is not to try to calculate consequences but simply to realise that they will come, and although there is no karmic inevitability, on the whole, bad begets bad. If we are to err, we must err on the side of good, because the line that divides good and bad is thin and often closer to our feet than we think. In such a morally precarious world, any wrongdoing, no matter how small, is a risk. As Sheriff Bell says, ‘You don’t want to lie without what it’s absolutely necessary.’ Bell is the moral beacon of the film, as Marge is in Fargo, because he simply upholds decency, refusing to step over the line. Burn after Reading (Joel and Ethan Coen, USA, 2008) is yet another film in which the basic dynamic is of decent people corrupted by understandable human weakness, with disastrous consequences. In this case, a classified CIA disc comes into the hands of two gym workers, Linda Litzke and Chad Feldheimer. Linda’s weakness is a desire for cosmetic surgery, compounded by an adoption of the crass self-help messages that its good to reinvent yourself and that positive thinking conquers all. Chad’s main weakness is not entirely his fault: he’s clearly pretty stupid. But he is too excited by the thrill of playing out a kind of movie fantasy. He ends up dead. Most tragic, however, is their manager, Ted. He is the decent guy almost to the end, and he gets no appreciation for it. He is in love with Linda, but she is blind to that, and Ted’s qualities. What she sees is a


dour, boring person, not a rare gem of decency in a corrupt world. So when he refuses to help with her crazy scheme to break into the home of the man she and Chad are effectively blackmailing, Osbourne Cox, she says, ‘I need a can-do person, Ted! I hate your negativity! I hate all your reasons why not! I hate you! I hate you!’ This is fatal. Seeing himself through the eyes of an unappreciative world, he overcomes his qualms and helps out. He ends up hatcheted to death. There are several pieces of Coen dialogue which explicitly state the idea that we have to be very careful indeed in what we do, because once we do something, we set off a chain of consequences we cannot control. In No Country for Old Men, Moss says, ‘Things happened. I can’t take ‘em back.’ In A Serious Man (Joel and Ethan Coen, USA, 2009), Larry says ‘Actions have consequences’. More colourfully, in Burn After Reading, Osbourne Cox says, ‘If you ever carried out your proposed threat, you would experience such a shitstorm of consequences, my friend, it would make your empty little head spin faster than your Schwinn bicycle over there.’ In most films, the consequences play out with a kind of inevitability that may not seem to be entirely realistic. However, this fatalism seems to be more important for narrative than ethical purposes. The moral message does not in any way depend upon the universe really being governed by karmic laws, or even by us knowing what the consequences of actions really turn out to be. This is shown most forcefully in A Serious Man, which introduces a greater degree of moral ambiguity. The film opens with a self-contained fable, set, it seems, in Eastern Europe, probably pre-twentieth century, with the dialogue in Yiddish. A man returns to his wife with an amazing story of being helped out on the road by someone she believes is dead. So when he arrives to accept the man’s offer of soup, she’s convinced he’s a dybbuk: a malicious, disembodied soul, caught between this world and the next. She is so confident about this that she stabs him. He doesn’t bleed ... but then he does. He leaves them, and we don’t know if he goes off to die or whether he really is a dybbuk. However, it seems to me it doesn’t matter who is right. The man gave the benefit of the doubt and offered hospitality to a stranger who helped him. The woman showed a lack of charity, and a chilling overconfidence in her righteousness. When the bleeding man leaves, her husband says, ‘We are ruined.’ She replies, ‘Nonsense, Velvel. Blessed is the Lord. Good riddance to evil.’ Whatever actually happens, the husband is right: they are already ruined. The wrong has been done and it can’t be taken back. From now on, they are tainted.

220


In the film proper, an ambiguity Larry has to deal with throughout the film is whether his Korean student is trying to bribe him. ‘Mere surmise,’ the student protests, while his father implores Larry, ‘Please. Accept mystery.’ Eventually, he rubs out the student’s failing F grade and awards a C. At that point, his doctor calls with ominous news about some test results. And a tornado heads straight for the Hebrew school his son goes to. Cause and effect? Implausible, perhaps. But this is a film, and in the world of the film, who knows? There might even be dybbuks. Correlation is not causation, but if bad consequences follow bad actions, we’ll never know if the former contributed to the latter. Far from being premised on karmic neatness, the apparently austere morality of the Coens’ movies suggests that the unknown and unknowable nature of consequences is even more reason to do right and keep your conscience clear. These films show us that being good is not something refined to be aspired too, not about being holier-than-thou. It is about keeping our baser instincts in check, not being greedy, being thankful for the good that is around us. To return to Mulhall’s claim that film is capable of ‘reflecting on and evaluating such views and arguments, as thinking seriously and systematically about then in just the ways that philosophers do,’ film can only do this, I suggest, if it contains within it the possibility of some kind of assessment of the ways of thinking it presents. Otherwise, the best it can do is give us ideas to go away and think about philosophically, in the conventional way. The films of the Coen brothers pass this test, because we do not just go away and think about whether the moral vision they contain is right. By seeing the reality in the situations, plots and characters within the film, we can also see directly whether they are truthful or not. However individual the worlds of each film are, they are recognisably human. The power of these philosophical interventions is due precisely to their not being elaborate or opaque. Yet they are philosophically vital, jolting our tendency to think about morality along the standard distinctions of moral theory.

Burn after reading In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein famously wrote: ‘My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it)’ (Wittgenstein, 1961,§ 6.54).


In the final dialogue of Burn after Reading, two CIA officers discuss the ‘cluster fuck’ which has resulted in more than one apparently pointless death. Gardner Chubb: What did we learn, Palmer? Palmer: I don’t know, sir. Chubb: I don’t fucking know either. I guess we learned not to do it again. Palmer: Yes sir. Chubb: Although I’m fucked if I know what we did. Those of us who are serious about the idea that film can be a form of philosophy must, I think, attend carefully to what both Wittgenstein and Chubb say. Chubb’s question mocks any desire the viewer might have to distil a simple moral from the film. But Chubb is not a deep thinker, and the fact that he doesn’t know what it is we should not do again shouldn’t be the last word. In an important sense, we don’t either, in that we can never know what small, wrong action can set us off down a road to disaster. But that ignorance is precisely the point: because we can never know, all we can do is try to stay the right side of the line, even if it seems of small consequence to step over it. However, the other ‘message’, namely, the absence of a message, is even more important. This is a film, not a treatise. That means we should adopt a similar attitude to our own attempts to write about film as Wittgenstein advised adopting to the Tractatus. While not literally senseless, the best our writing can do is to get people to attend to features of films that they may otherwise not have noticed. My attempts to say sensible things about ethics in the films of the Coen Brothers should be read in this spirit. If film is philosophy, then the film is the thing, not the writing about it. In other words, with this and other writing about film as philosophy: Burn after Reading.

References Dennett, D. C., 1989. The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Descartes, R., 1986. Meditations on First Philosophy. Translated by J. Cottingham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frampton, D., 2006. Filmosophy. London: Wallflower Press. Mulhall, S., 2002. On Film. London: Routledge. —— 2007. ‘Film as Philosophy: The Very Idea’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 107 (1, pt3) pp. 279–94. Taylor, K., 2009. Cruelty: Human Evil and the Human Brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

222


Wittgenstein, L., 1961. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuiness. London: Routledge. Zimbardo, P., 2008. The Lucifer Effect. London: Rider & Co.

Filmography Barton Fink (Joel Coen, USA, 1991). The Big Lebowski (Joel Coen, USA, 1998). Burn after Reading (Joel and Ethan Coen, USA, 2008). Fargo (Joel Coen, USA, 1996). Intolerable Cruelty (Joel Coen, USA, 2003). The Ladykillers (Joel and Ethan Coen, USA, 2004). The Man Who Wasn’t There (Joel Coen, USA, 2001). No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, USA, 2007). A Serious Man (Joel and Ethan Coen, USA, 2009).

13 A Bleak Burlesque: Michael Haneke’s Funny Games as a Study in Violence Andrew McGettigan

Two youths intrude upon the lakeside holiday home of a family of three. Intriguing their way into the kitchen, they ensure that the single mobile phone is soaked in the sink and rendered unusable before proceeding, over the course of a night, to impose upon Ann, George and their young son, Georgie. The family endure a series of games where the stakes are either to escape or choose the manner of death. All three are killed: the child and father by shotgun; the mother, tied up, is pushed from her own boat into the lake depths. The film ends with the pair of killers sailing around the lake to the next house and repeating the trick by which they had gained entry previously: presenting themselves as the guests of friendly neighbours, they ask to borrow some eggs. The above paragraph describes two films, Funny Games (Austria) and Funny Games (USA), both directed by Michael Haneke, who remade his own Austrian film from 1997 a decade later: the second version is an extraordinary act of shot-for-shot self-plagiarism.1 Previous readings of the film have debated its ‘message’: it is held that its grim tone suspends entertainment in order to confront the audience with their unthinking consumption of screen violence (an approach to some extent supported by Haneke’s often facetious interviews and promotional strategy). Despite the violent subject of the film, very little is clearly depicted; it deliberately constrains its more savage acts. Only two deaths, out of four in total, are made fully available to the eye: a shooting, which is subsequently ‘rewound’, and the drowning of the wife. As Catherine Wheatley (2008, p.21) writes: Some 30 minutes into the film, however, one of the antagonists turns to the camera and winks, announcing a series of self-reflexive strategies aimed at forcing spectators to acknowledge their complicity in 223

224


the horrific spectacle of torture and murder – albeit one where the violence unfolds outside the frame. This, then, was a film made with the clear agenda of goading viewers into examining their relation with, and desire for, screen violence. In her subsequent book, Wheatley (2009) attempts to position Haneke as a Kantian seeking to promote autonomy in his viewers, but it strikes me that this conception of ‘reflection’ (which would somehow be enforced on viewers) is severely limited in its understanding of the individual reactions of filmgoers, many of whom were entertained by this film as a horror genre-piece. Others resisted such a presentation as ‘rebuke’ or ‘harangue’. Tartan Films, who co-financed Funny Games (USA), collapsed in July 2008 owing to the remake’s poor tickets sales. Box office impact is often the least enlightening dimension of a film, but here it was held to prove that Haneke’s strategy had backfired. Films are expressive, but that expression does not reduce to a message: philosophical sense can dissipate in the desire for the immediacy of content. Such an approach frequently covers over aspects which deserve most attention. In relation to Funny Games, contra Wheatley, the violence does not all ‘unfold outside the frame’: some blows are seen (Ann is punched in the stomach, one of the killers stamps on George’s broken leg). Nor does it evince the monotonous tone suggested by the idea of ‘message’: the variety of violence onscreen can only be appreciated through a different tack. My concern here is to connect the film to philosophy differently by making explicit its formal aesthetic and structure in relation to an earlier claim. Siegfried Kracauer asserts that part of film’s value lies in its apparent sadism: its ability to capture, preserve and project back again what is otherwise obscured by the emotional turmoil of first-hand witnesses. ‘In deliberately detailing feats of sadism in their films, Rosselini and Buñuel force the spectator to take in these appalling sights and at the same time impress them on him as real life events recorded by the imperturbable camera’ (Kracauer, 1960, pp.57–8). How can cinema contribute to an understanding of violence? If there are acts which ‘overwhelm consciousness’, and therefore preclude learning through direct encounter, Kracauer suggests we take seriously the idea that violence can be investigated through film, since ‘only the camera can present without distortion’. To extend Kracauer’s claim, I would argue that this ‘reality-effect’ can be distorted by narrative, plot and action: dramatic forms can cover over what violence is when enjoyment, empathetic identification and catharsis (the pleasurable

A Bleak Burlesque: Haneke’s Funny Games 225

relief associated with the structured experience of fear and pity) are privileged.2 Funny Games is philosophical in that it contributes to an understanding of violence by offering an alternative to disingenuous and sensationalist generic narrative settings. The challenge is how not to traduce violence and its effects, how to present it without it being pornographic or consumable, how to make it available to reflection. Here, reflection indicates the ability to reflect on affective and emotional experience such that one can come to understand it in phenomenological fashion. This is distinct from the ethical sense of condemning the complicity of viewing violence. That is, pace Haneke’s comments on Pasolini’s Salò (Italy, 1975), Funny Games is a distinct effort to ‘show violence for what it is’ (Romney, 2006): a companion to the pantomime, organised exuberance of the former. The first part of this chapter will examine the construction of the film, paying particular attention to its punctuating structure (what I term the ‘burlesque’ form) and how this disrupts identification and empathy. I take this to be the key condition for appreciating the distinct effect of its presentation of violence. The second part will examine the variation in violent deaths and how this provides an opportunity for thinking violence.

Part 1: ‘Burlesque’ – the subtraction of plot and the effects on empathetic identification As noted by Hamish Ford (private conversation), in terms of genre, Funny Games appears as the most conventional of Haneke’s films. But with its pared, brutalist structure and bleak ending, it frustrated expectations. Within the broad, organising genre of the slasher, where the home invasion provides the orienting threat, we encounter a sequence of games, instead of a standard plot. These games run from ‘Name that Tune’ (or more accurately, ‘Name that Tune, Singer and Composer’) through Treasure Hunt (‘colder, warmer’), where the prize is the dead pet hidden in the four-by-four; via golf to ‘Kitten in the Sack’, ‘Hide and Seek’, the knock-out game of ‘Eeny Meeny Miney Mo’, and the various bets and stakes which transform flagging down passing cars into a form of Russian Roulette. Nor should we neglect the various shows of pretence and role-play from this survey. Each game engages those onscreen and those viewing differently: a series of games, as opposed to the blows and events that give a plot its twists, produces a distinct syntax, a stop-start rhythm (each scene in Funny Games varies its pacing, editing and composition of shots). It is

226


this punctuation which is distinct and can be read as an anti-narrative subtracted from within the overarching genre-form. In this manner, the film’s form connects to popular entertainment such as the variety or music hall show and the pantomime. Crucially Funny Games utilises a ‘compère’ – one of the killers – who directs the action and provides a link between the scenes. French Grand Guignol theatre offers a telling comparison, since a typical evening’s programme there would involve several short, one-act plays which developed a mixture of slapstick comedy, horror, melodrama and titillation acting upon the most fundamental of emotions: fear and pity. The principle underlying this bracing programme was termed la douche écossaise by analogy with hydrotherapy – hot and cold blasts alternated. This represents a heightened development of the Aristotelian conception of catharsis as purgative. Such a ‘burlesque’ is governed by no single tone, though black humour was the ‘dark and hidden ingredient’ (Gordon 1997, p.3). This varying, burlesque structure allows violence to be experienced differently: threat persists with none of the usual relief found in execution. The compère’s asides, which appear to some as diegetic breaches, instead form an integral aspect performing two functions. On the one hand, the killers are connected to the audience. In their discussion of these gestures in Grand Guignol, Hand and Wilson (2002, pp. 36–7) argue that the gaze turned towards the audience is a look of ‘invitation and collusion’. Haneke himself has cited the cinematic example of Tom Jones (Tony Richardson, UK, 1963) as formative for him (Wray, 2007). On the other hand, these moments act as a punctuation which avoids the release of narrative tension marking catharsis. One is able to tarry with the experience longer than normal, making it available for reflection rather than titillation. As Peter Bradshaw notes, the anguish of Funny Games is thereby increased. Like the twisted clinician he is, he knows exactly how to make us wince and squirm and gibber. His torturers will remind us it is only a film, an invention, but one we have licensed with our ticketpurchase; they will breach the fourth wall, speak directly into the camera, rewind the action when it doesn’t suit them. The immediate effect is not moralistic. It is simply an inspired way of adding about 30% to the general anguish. ... There are no real plot developments to disperse or deflect the agony. (Bradshaw, 2008) In this context of games, Roland Barthes’s essay on wrestling captures something of the effect achieved by Haneke; the episodic images of


passion are illuminated in a ‘sum of spectacles’: ‘each moment imposes the total knowledge of a passion which rises erect and alone, without ever extending to the crowning moment of a result’ (1957, p.16, my emphasis). This variation in scenes offers a series of studies in the presentation of violence. Moreover, Haneke’s tendency to utilise static camera positions and long takes is set against the enticing character of moving images. We are not seduced by the omniscience, speed or complexity of the camerawork and hence, we do not primarily identify with the camera. Its form of artifice does not invoke the violent allure of action films. In rejecting this traditional approach to filming death, Funny Games provides an important counter-example to the intimate relation of murder and montage (see Oeler, 2009). We should consider how this allies it to classical theatre in the way it works. Cinematic experience is still informed by features previously discussed through the terms ‘compassion’ and ‘pity’. ‘Identification’ is often insufficient to grasp the manner of connection formed with the onscreen and the effects that depend on such bonds.3 Wheatley has claimed that the narrative of Funny Games aligns us empathetically with the threatened family, the victims (2009, p. 81). But it is a far more complex viewing experience. The replacement of plot by interruptive devices and games displaces empathy and identification into the question, ‘Whose side are you on?’ Suspending this natural empathy is crucial for coming to understand violence philosophically. As Žižek (2008, p. 3) notes: ‘... there is something inherently mystifying in a direct confrontation with [violence]: the overpowering horror of violent acts and empathy with the victims inexorably function as a lure which prevents us from thinking’. From the opening credits, the family is estranged from the audience. Shot from above, both the yacht being towed by the car as they drive towards their holiday home and the in-car entertainment – not only listening to opera, but challenging each other to identify the performers – declare that this family is not ‘everyone’ but an upper middle class family, who play golf on holiday and misunderstand the game and the film they are in. It is not that they have a social status distinct from the audience, but the connection through common humanity is upset by poor intitial judgments. Haneke comments: ‘There is an irony in the way their music suggests their deliberate isolation from the exterior world, and in the end they are trapped in a sense by their bourgeois notions and accoutrements, not just by the killers alone’ (Sharrett, 2004). Imagine, for instance, a disturbed ‘slash’ re-imagining in which the two youths attempt to impose themselves on Ray Winstone’s family in Nil by Mouth (Gary Oldman, UK, 1997).

228


The horror of the film commences at George’s failure to side with his wife and evict the intruding youths. Appealing to a customary role as arbitrator, he invites them to give their side of the story: ‘I can hardly play the mediator, if I don’t know the facts.’ His repeated invocation of reasonableness and belief in a possible recuperation of normality marks his failure to achieve agency. Too late he responds to the impertinent, importunate strangers, but his misjudged escalation (a slap to the face) results in a broken knee, which means he can have no action role. He is toyed with and mocked throughout. When speaking to the son, the killers belittle him: ‘You see how your mum fights for you? Your daddy could learn something from her.’ The audience is provided with no normal possibility of identification here. In contrast to Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1954), which also features a temporarily disabled protagonist, there is no counter-narrative of detection and discovery: George’s actions are limited to drying out a sodden mobile phone with a hairdryer so that he can try to call the police. The characters of the two killers are underdeveloped to the extent that Haneke insists on their status as ciphers (Sharrett, 2004). The complaint that the killers in Funny Games are not ‘fearsome’, points to the antagonists as motiveless, demonic clowns (whose jokes are not funny and whose slapstick, the comedy of cruelty, hurts and kills); they unveil the mirth, the mocking scorn and ‘snarling grimace of the devil’ (Benjamin, 1928, p. 127). Their invasion of the second home will not be thwarted in the manner of The Ladykillers (Alexander Mackendrick, UK, 1955) or Home Alone (Chris Columbus, USA, 1990). Their white costumes and gloves cite mime, whilst their own game of cycling through monikers repeatedly turns to comic or cartoon duos (‘Peter’ & ‘Paul’, ‘Beavis and Butthead’, ‘Tom and Jerry’). Or, as ‘tenth-rate actors’, the pair echo the two sent to despatch Josef K (Kafka, 1925, p. 125).4 They make much of their polite manners and friendly intentions but have weapons and use them. When do viewers side with serial killers? There are precursors here. Firstly, let us consider Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, UK, 1949). Against the callous backstory of forced exile from an aristocratic family, Louis Mazzini, from his post as a draper’s assistant, murders and manipulates his way back into the fold to become the Duke of Chalfont. Alongside the dynamic agency of the scheming, only manifested in Mazzini’s intrigues, the audience is bound through the use of voiceover, which is adopted in altered form by more recent films, such as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (John McNaughton, USA, 1986). While not using the voiceover, Funny Games does imbue one of the killers with more control over the action. As compère, the lead aggressor


addresses the audience through the aside, whether wink or direct question. Dominant, importunate and articulate, as master of ceremonies, Paul asks the viewer whether the torment should continue, since the film ‘hasn’t reached feature length yet’. As such (contrary to those who read these as modernist or Brechtian alienation effects), this establishes a rapport, not distance. A rapport which has a comic and popular history in the same forms discussed above. It is worth differentiating this forced identification of the voiceover, where the viewer has no alternative, from Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, UK, 1960), in which the effected sympathy for Mark Lewis is achieved through his bumbling social isolation and the backstory of his deforming upbringing (by a father who sought to study the development of neurosis and scopophilia in adolescents). Similarly, A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, UK, 1971) – a ‘noble failure’, according to Haneke (Wray, 2007) – elicits such effects in its depiction of the adolescent, Alex, and the subsequent retortion enacted against him through statesponsored aversion therapy and individual acts of vengeance. Within Funny Games, the killers are neither symptoms of the violent times nor victims of generational abuse passed on. Any sympathy, understanding or explanation is set up and ridiculed in the dialogue conducted on the couch as the pair enact backstories from tabloid imaginings. A distinct moment in the film, the sofa scene becomes a music hall double act, an exchange worthy of Beckett. In their articulacy, and capacity to shift the personae in play, these discussions demonstrate their superiority over George, the father. They command identification by virtue of the diegetic control they exhibit, such that choosing a side becomes a test for the audience, who struggle not to be accomplices alongside the killers and the director. Their Protean power is a strength which, alongside the attraction of terrible deeds, exacts a fascination, or, in Bazin’s (1982) term, a ‘moral seduction’. Carol Clover (1992, p. 8) has drawn out the manner in which slasher films manipulate camera point of view to effect a ‘waxing and waning’ of identification: A standard horror format calls for a variety of positions and character sympathies in the early phases of the story, but, as the plot goes on, a consolidation at both levels (story and cinematography), and in the final phase a fairly tight organization around the functions of victim and hero (which may be collapsed into one figure or, alternatively, split into many).

230


By the end, empathy is organised behind the victim who triumphs. In Funny Games, one finds no consolidation of identification through plot. Replaced by ‘siding’, identification is contested and distributed by a variety of strategies and developments. Having already established a privileged connection to the audience – the wink on discovery of the dead pet – the lead oppressor, Paul, lays down a bet with the family: ‘In 12 hours, all three of you will be kaput. ... You bet you’ll be alive; we bet you’ll be dead.’ After the family refuse to participate, Paul turns to face the audience, ‘What do you think? You’re on their side, aren’t you? Who are you betting on?’ Peter and Paul discuss the logic of such a wager: ‘What kind of bet is this? If they’re dead, they can’t live up to their side. And if they win, they can’t live either. They’ll lose either way.’ Here we see an echo of Pascal’s Pensées where the non-believer is asked to consider, from the rational perspective of calculation, the choice to believe as a wager on possible outcomes.5 Despite being presented as a choice, the bet works to unsettle empathy, not in the simplistic sense of moralising judgment, but in comportment: one senses from this point that it is not going to end well. The bet is presented to the audience as a wager on a fair competition – but we are not sure how the odds are stacked. Barthes neatly distinguishes the fundamental difference between wrestling as spectacle from boxing as sport along this axis: The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees. ... One can bet on the outcome of a boxing match: with wrestling it would make no sense. (Barthes, 1957, pp.15–16) Similarly one does not go into the movie theatre for a bet, so its explicit presentation disrupts normal viewing experience: can we avoid favouring a side? In effect, we are connected to the attitudes of other popular forms, such as the pantomime, so that the viewer is sucked into the film in a way at variance from others of this kind. In summary, this experience can be analysed into two aspects: 1 The bet sets the pace for the film: the killers are the agents – there is no ‘detection’ element which provides counter-agency as in many thrillers. This binds the audience, whilst the passive, complacent family struggle to elicit Clover’s ‘character sympathy’.


2 The chief killer, Paul, can address the audience directly – he is the compère or intriguer. Walter Benjamin in his book on German drama has several pertinent comments here: ‘The alternation of the sadist between ... childlike laughter and ... adult shock can be seen in the intriguer.’ It is this figure of the roguish schemer who both drives the plot and introduces jokes at the expense of the tragic characters. Benjamin cites Iago and Polonius as examples of this type. (Benjamin, 1998, pp.125–6)

Part 2: reflections on violence In combination with the alternative structure provided by the ‘games’, disrupted empathy and identification is the condition for the novel presentation of violence. Here I now consider four deaths, each differently presented in what is shown, what is off-screen, and what effects are displayed. This variation is crucial, since it is what is occluded in reading the film as a message or a rebuke. The scene on the sofa, discussed above, develops as the son is forced to be the ‘Kitten in the Sack’. Hooded with a bag, ‘for the sake of decency’, he is mildly tortured to cajole the mother, Ann, into stripping. The scene is filmed in prudish fashion only showing the faces of those present: Ann’s embarrassed defiance, George’s shame and a close-up on Peter’s face, who takes virginal delight in her naked presence. The game ends with ‘Little Georgie’ pissing himself. One of the killers decides to ‘change’ him, and as the two parents attempt to intervene, the child escapes to the house next-door. He learns what the viewer had already surmised: the killers have already visited and that the neighbours are dead. There is no help to be had there, but as he hides from Paul he finds a shotgun. There is a scene of confrontation in which the child raises the gun, but, after being instructed how to fire it, discovers that the gun is not loaded. In this act of failed revenge, with a child as the agent of retribution, or potential protagonist, the stakes of the bet are brought to bear. On returning him to the lounge and his parents, Paul snitches to the parents about the ‘dreadful’ act of their son. Crucially, the child is killed first. Up to this point, the family had seemed pitiful and the killers amusingly playful. It is the escape scene followed by aftermath which transforms our relation to them. After Georgie has been retrieved from the neighbour’s house, he is reunited with his mother and father on the living room couch. The television is showing motor racing. Peter commences the counting

232


game, ‘Eeeny, meeny, miney, mo’, while the camera cuts to the kitchen where Paul prepares a sandwich. The associated clatter of crockery and cutlery, combined with the TV noise, obscures the sound coming from the lounge. The counting finishes and a gunshot heard, followed by the sound of George, the father, sobbing. Paul then returns to the lounge where he admonishes Peter: ‘Idiot, you don’t kill the person counted out; you kill the one left over.’ The camera now cuts to a shot of the television splattered with blood and the dead child. Paul and Peter leave. There then follows a nine-minute ‘aftermath’ scene in which a nearly static camera, in a single take, records the efforts of Ann and George. Hamish Ford (2006) emphasises how the film is slowed down to a floundering ebb at this point as the agents of menace leave the bereft parents behind. Ann, kneeling with head bowed by the sofa, is taped up at the hands and ankle. She gets to her feet with difficulty and hops over to the television to turn it off. George struggles to get to his feet. Ann hops to the kitchen to fetch a knife and returns to help lift George to the sofa. George is inarticulate with grief – it takes them two minutes of gruelling struggle to get from the sofa to the hall and it will prove impossible for him to flee. Haneke has described Funny Games as a ‘parody of the thriller’ and it is at this point that it is most distanced from action movies, where an unrealistic treatment of violence and its consequent injury underlies the drama of that genre. Witness the diverting, car-crash nonsense in the recent Bond and Bourne movies: the spectacle of the stunts traduces violence. Duration, interruption, delay and display are crucial here to provide an appropriate ‘externalized image of torture’ (Barthes, 1957, p. 20). The viewer was deprived of the illicit thrill of the violent act, since it was offscreen, and by concentrating on the aftermath and the parents, sympathy shifts again: the relation between Ann and George is depicted from a new angle with scenes of affection and declarations of love – Ann does not remonstrate with George for his earlier failure to back her against the boys. Ann’s subsequent flight to the outside road presents her with a dilemma: whether to flag down passing vehicles. Having heard the killers drive off, she must take the further chance that each approaching car does not bring their return. She chooses the second car and fails. She is returned to the holiday home and set down on the sofa again. They inaugurate a game called, ‘The Loving Wife’, or, ‘Whether by knife or by gun, losing your life can sometimes be fun.’ Ann is invited to determine whether George is killed quickly by gunshot or is stabbed to death.


George tells her not to provide this satisfaction and that she should refuse to play along. At this point, Paul turns to the audience and asks, ‘Do you think it’s enough? You want a real ending, right? A plausible plot development, don’t you?’ Ann is required to recite a child’s prayer: ‘I love you God with all my might, keep me safe all through the night.’ She repeats it once but is instructed that she has to mean it, to pray ‘properly from the bottom of your heart’.6 George is tortured off camera to encourage her to a second performance. This is treated as a ‘dry run’. As Paul asks Ann to say the prayer backwards, she manages to snatch the retrieved shotgun from the table and shoots Peter. This killing is depicted graphically in full shot as the blast hits him in the chest and fires him back into the wall. It is the only gore effect in the film. We see both action (the shot fired) and the death in classic montage-form. Paul pauses, breathes and nervously sniggers before grabbing the gun and concussing Ann with the butt. He throws down the gun and looks frantically for the TV remote control. As compère, he then uses his peculiar powers to rewind the action – the viewer sees the shooting sequence reverse before their eyes to the point before Ann lunges. Peter’s death is undone. There is no means to interpret this coup.7 The artificiality of this violent death is underscored: it provides a completely different experience to the preceding one. The sequence begins again, but this time Paul anticipates her movement and beats her to the tabletop where the gun is placed. He tells her she has broken the rules of the game and has lost by default. George is shot from above with the camera not on his prone body, but the heads of the two killers. The firing of the gun is seen, but the body is obscured by the sofa. There is no dwelling on the immediate aftermath this time: the scene cuts with the bang of the gun to the lakeside dock with Ann being led by the two killers on to George’s boat. This death is incidental: subsumed within the ‘rewind’ effect. On reflection, one has the bizarre sense that it barely registered within the overall impact of the film. The rewound shotgun death here represents an extreme to be set against the quietus of the concluding killing. There is no heroic, Apollonian ending. Ann dies ‘like a dog’: pushed overboard, shamefully mocked with a kiss, ‘Ciao, Bella’, while the two killers debate the terms of the original bet. The drowning sequence, in contrast to the artificiality of the gunshot killing, is unsettling in its realism. It is composed through a variety of shots. An aerial view (the companion to the opening credits) establishes that we are out on the lake, not in a water tank on a set. Whereas

234


the gunshot death is little more than ‘ketchup and plastic’ skilfully manipulated, the drowning is established within a complicated sailing episode where rough weather is negotiated. Besides the ‘real’ sailing skills demonstrated, Ann is ‘really’ trussed up and pushed off the boat in open water (there is more risk to the actor in this shot: how was she rescued? How much preparation and trust underlies this footage?) It calls to mind Bazin’s comments on the dialectic of real and imaginary in his discussion of Crin Blanc (Albert Lamorisse, Denmark, 1954). A number of scenes were shot virtually without the help of trick work and certainly with a considerable disregard for very real dangers. It is that fringe of trick work, that margin of subterfuge demanded by the logic of the story that allows what is imaginary to include what is real and at the same time to substitute for it. (Bazin, 2005, pp. 47–8) The elliptical, confused discussion between the killers of what seems to be Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, USSR, 1972), given the reference to ‘Kelvin’, touches on this theme: the reality of different film-images. The act is shown in realistic fashion, but we do not see the asphyxiation: there is no underwater shot of Ann dying. There is no aftermath. The question is raised: ‘Do we see, in terms of both visual representation and conceptualisation, a death by drowning as we do a killing by gunshot?’ A history of drowning in film would be welcome here so that a move towards an answer could be made.8 The killers sail to the next house along the lakeshore and this time Paul asks the owner for the eggs. He looks directly into camera and the film ends, or rather, begins again. Ann had appeared as likely to take the role of Clover’s ‘Final Girl’, the slasher staple, the victim who reverses the roles, evades death and exacts revenge. Her perspective approaches that of the viewer: she knows something is amiss from the start (‘I don’t know what your game is but I’m not playing’), resists the manipulations of the two killers, and snatches the shotgun. Within the archetypal, mythic structure of horror, the ‘force of audience experience comes from knowing both sides of the story’ in advance (Clover, 1992, pp.9–12). Lively fans enjoy the variations and surprises – the inventiveness of deaths and the gore effects sprung upon them within the broader, familiar structure, which climaxes with the killer’s death. If viewed as genre horror, which is always possible, then Haneke’s ‘twist’, upping the ante, is to offer the ‘final girl’ (Ann) as a feint before placing to the fore the other staple of the horror series – the intimation of a sequel: the return of the despatched killer. From this


perspective, the fan can enjoy a second order pleasure; one is not forced to reflect on the consumption of screen violence. In subsequent interviews, Haneke gleefully recounted the Cannes 1998 screening, where Ann’s short-lived triumph was greeted by cheering swiftly quieted.9 The classic structure of catharsis has an exhilarated audience allowed to release the accumulated tension and, finally, enjoy acts of justified, retributive violence. There is a right to self-defence and a desire to restore social order. Barthes, again, captures this exactly: The baser the action of the ‘bastard’, the more delighted the public is by the blow which he justly receives in return. If the villain ... takes refuge behind the ropes ... he is inexorably pursued there and caught, and the crowd is jubilant at seeing the rules broken for the sake of a deserved punishment. (1957, p.21) He notes that even a minor infringement can open an unrestrained thirst for retribution. The understanding of cinematic violence and its experience is bound up in this phenomenon. Its casual, exploitative commandeering in the rape revenge and vigilante movie grants the audience both the ‘bad’, transgressive pleasure of witnessing the crime and the righteous retribution of victim without any ‘auto-reflection’. With the undone climax in Funny Games, one gets neither except in disrupted, troubling form. Emotional response in the audience stutters, staggers without reaching a climax, experiencing only brief respite and resumption. If we add this caesura to the other reflexive moments (the bets, winks, looks) we can discern a peculiar suspense-structure as generic narrative is subtracted from the inside. Dramatic time is manipulated differently and violence is thereby experienced in a manner distinct from its normal artificial cinematic form, from which we learn no more about violence than we do from wrestling.

Conclusion The visual appeal of violence, underscored by both Benjamin (1928, p.51) and Aristotle (1996, p.19), for whom tragedy demands ‘deaths in full view, extreme agony, woundings and so on’, is limited in Funny Games. It would be naive to equate this with a general repudiation of violent images, which occur in Haneke’s subsequent films; he is not promoting an iconoclasm, but concerned with a counter-aesthetic. The ‘games’ constitute a series of distractions or entertainments: a burlesque, with minimal connection, besides the compère and clown

236


concerned with keeping the audience involved. A distinct variation on emplotment, the burlesque generates a new affective possibility where the caesura marks a necessary relief from attrition (without which it would risk becoming grindingly overbearing) but also generates the occasion for reflection on what is experienced. The four deaths, extracted from cathartic narrative drive, open up different forms of affective experience to consideration. Herein lies its philosophical contribution: not in the immediate content of a message, or prompt to convert viewers, but in making available what is otherwise occluded and manipulated. Funny Games, as polemic or provocation, offers an alternative artifice which would address violence in a responsible fashion without succumbing to its allure. We do not currently know or learn what violence is through film – yet this is possibly its real philosophical potential.

Notes 1. I refer to the film in the singular for the majority of the essay, cite dialogue from the US version and use English spellings for the characters’s names. 2. ‘Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is admirable, complete and possesses magnitude; in language made pleasurable, each of its species separated in different parts; performed by actors, not through narration; effecting through pity and fear the purification [katharsis] of such emotions.’ (Aristotle, 1996, p. 10) 3. For the sophistication of the debate around issues of compassion, pity and catharsis in Seventeenth century French drama, see Ibbett (2008). Contemporary ‘Philosophy of Film’ lacks this dimension. An important point for philosophical intervention is located here: the treatment of pity in philosophy since Spinoza. Adorno and Horkheimer (1947) detail how a certain aspect of Stoicism is taken up by the enlightenment as, with the exception of Rousseau, pity is reduced to a feeling to be managed. 4. I will adopt the convention of naming the killers according to the credit sequence. Paul is the leader, Peter, the sidekick (Tubby’ on occasion). 5. ‘At the extremity of this infinite distance a game is in progress, where either heads or tails my turn up. What will you wager? According to reason, you cannot bet either way; according to reason you can defend neither proposition. ... The right thing is not to wager at all. Yes, but a bet must be laid. There is no option: you have joined the game. ... Let us weigh the gain and loss involved by wagering that God exists. Let us estimate these two possibilities: if you win, you win all; if you lose, you lose nothing.’ (Pascal, 1670, pp.92–6) Pascal’s wager had already appeared in an earlier Haneke film: 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls, Austria, 1994). The boy who ends up conducting the shooting in the bank is shown in one scene explaining the nature of the wager to a companion in the school canteen. 6. The prayer scene described above has a further analogue in the same Pascalian ‘Pensée’ from which the wager is taken. There Pascal outlines that the inability to believe is the result of passions and that in order to attain faith, one

A Bleak Burlesque: Haneke’s Funny Games 237 should act ‘as if you already believe ... attend mass, say prayers, etc’. ‘What have you to lose?’ 7. The rewind sequence with its consequent ‘undoing’ has precedents in film history. In Superman: The Movie (Richard Donner, USA, 1978), the hero flies counter to the world’s turning direction creating a force that first slows down the speed of rotation, before reversing its spin direction. Time is thereby reversed sufficiently to enable him to arrive to rescue Lois from her demise in an earthquake. No superpowers or mythological explanation is evoked in Funny Games for this quasi-demonic irruption. 8. Here one would have to consider the drowning sequence at the swimming baths in Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in Tomas Alfredson, Sweden, 2008). Filmed from under the surface (as the child, Oskar, is held under by the older bully), the commonplace that drowning entails a beatific sweetness is transformed as a demonic force brings about the destruction of enemies, while the camera remains on his rapt face. Grace falls as the disembodied body parts cascade into the water disturbed by the frantic kicks of the soon to be slaughtered. 9. This coup, evidence of the way in which the director had manipulated the audience, was planned as an ambush for that particular occasion: publicity and information was kept to a minimum; the film was promoted as a thriller; tickets bore a red warning sticker for content, which had only previously been done for Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarrantino, USA, 1992).

References Interviews with Haneke Romney, J., 2006. Film Notes. Included as Liner Insert. Funny Games: Collector’s Edition [DVD]. Directed by Michael Haneke. London: Tartan Video. Sharrett, C., 2004. The World that Is Known: Michael Haneke Interviewed. Kinoeye, [online]. 4 (1), 8 March. Available at: http://www.kinoeye.org/04/01/ interview01.php [Accessed 22 November 2009]. Wray, J., 2007. Minister of Fear. The New York Times 23 September. [online] Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/magazine/23haneket.html?_r=1 [Accessed 22 November 2009].

Other works Adorno, T. and Horkheimer, M., 1947. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Translated from German by E. Jephcott, 2002. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Aristotle, 1996. Poetics. Translated from Ancient Greek by M. Heath. London: Penguin. Bazin, A., 1982. The Cinema of Cruelty: from Buñuel to Hitchcock. Ed F. Truffaut. Translated from French by Sabine d’Estrée with the assistance of Tiffany Fliss. NewYork: Seaver Books. Barthes, R., 1957. The World of Wrestling. Translated from French by A. Lavers. In Mythologies. London: Vintage, 1993, pp.15–25. Bazin, A., 2005. What is Cinema? Volume 1. Translated from French by H. Gray. London: University of California Press.

238


Benjamin, W., 1928. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated from German by J. Osborne., 1998. New York: Verso. Bradshaw, P., 2008. Games without frontiers. The Guardian, 4 April. Film & Music p. 7. Brecht, B., 1949. A Short Organum for the Theatre. Translated from German by J. Willett. In J. Willett, ed. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. London: Methuen, pp.179–205. Clover, C.J., 1992. Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. London: BFI Publishing. Ford, H., 2006. Audio Commentary. Funny Games [DVD]. Directed by Michael Haneke. Collingwood, Australia: Madman Films. Gordon, M., 1997. Grand Guignol: Theatre of Fear and Terror. Revised edition. New York: Da Capo. Hand, R.J. & Wilson, M., 2002. Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Ibbett, K., 2008. Pity, Compassion, Commiseration: Theories of Theatrical Relatedness. Seventeenth-Century French Studies, 30 (2), pp. 196–208. Kafka, F., 1925. The Trial. Translated from German by W. and E. Muir. In The Complete Novels, 1992. London: Minerva Press, pp. 11–128. Kracauer, S., 1960. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960. Oeler, K., 2009. A Grammar of Murder: Violent Scenes and Film Form. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press. Pascal, B., 1670. Pensées: Notes on Religion and other subjects. Translated from French by John Warrington. 1973. London: JM Dent & sons. Wheatley, C., 2008. Unkind Rewind. Sight and Sound, April 2008. pp. 18–22. Wheatley, C., 2009. Michael Haneke’s Cinema: The Ethic of the Image. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Žižek, S., 2008. On Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books.

Filmography Films by Michael Haneke Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls (Fragments of a Chronology of Chance) (Austria, 1994). Funny Games (Austria, 1997). Funny Games (US) (USA, 2007).

Other films A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, UK, 1971). Crin Blanc (Albert Lamorisse, Denmark, 1954). Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (John McNaughton, USA, 1986). Home Alone (Chris Columbus, USA, 1990). Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, UK, 1949). The Ladykillers (Alexander Mackendrick, UK, 1955). Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in) (Tomas Alfredson, Sweden, 2008). Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, USA, 1994).

A Bleak Burlesque: Haneke’s Funny Games 239 Nil by Mouth (Gary Oldman, UK, 1997). Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, UK, 1960). Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1954). Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarrantino, USA, 1992). Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy, 1975). Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, USSR, 1972). Superman: The Movie (Richard Donner, USA, 1978). Tom Jones (Tony Richardson, UK, 1963).

14 In the Grip of Grief: Epistemic Impotence and the Materiality of Mourning in Shinya Tsukamoto’s Vital Havi Carel Until you remember you cannot forget. (Greg Tuck) 1 ‘haptic’ is a better word than ‘tactile’ since it does not establish an opposition between two sense organs but rather invites the assumption that the eye itself may fulfil this nonoptical function. (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.492)

In the grip of grief: synopsis When someone close to us dies, we usually say that we are with them ‘in our thoughts’ or that they remain alive in our minds. The film Vital (Shinya Tsukamoto, Japan, 2004) challenges this disembodied view of grief by posing the following question: what would grief be like if we could keep the dead with us not only in our memories, but materially? The film provides an intriguing answer to this question, provided through a unique setting, that of a medical school dissection class. Despite the macabre setting, Tsukamoto’s aim is not to shock but to offer an intense meditation on the embodied nature of mourning.2 Vital tells the story of a medical student, Hiroshi (Tadanobu Asano), who was involved in a car crash, which caused him memory loss and in which his lover, Ryoko (Nami Tsukamoto), died. The film opens with Hiroshi waking up in the hospital. He cannot recognise his father’s face, or remember the accident. He recovers physically and returns to his parents’ home, but his memory is still inaccessible to him. Once at home, Hiroshi discovers his medical textbooks and decides to resume his studies, which he has left before the accident. 240

Epistemic Impotence and the Materiality of Mourning in Vital

241

Hiroshi returns to medical school, but still cannot remember events that took place before the accident, or the accident itself. He excels in his studies, but remains socially isolated and rejects the attention of Ikumi, a fellow student. The class embarks on a four-month dissection course. When he begins his dissection training, Hiroshi becomes obsessed with the cadaver assigned to him. At first, it is unclear why, but it transpires that the cadaver Hiroshi is dissecting is that of his dead lover, Ryoko. Hiroshi continues dissecting Ryoko’s cadaver, in the hope that he will discover the cause of her death and regain his memory. As Hiroshi progresses in his dissection of Ryoko’s cadaver, his memory gradually returns. But as his memory returns, he comes to view the flashback scenes shown to him and us not as memories, but as real encounters with Ryoko, taking place here and now. Hiroshi visits Ryoko’s parents, to tell them about these encounters. Ryoko’s father tells him how insistent Ryoko was to donate her body and that her body would go to the medical school at which Hiroshi was studying. She wanted to be with him after her death and this was her way of guaranteeing it. The film ends with Ryoko’s cremation, with Hiroshi clutching at the coffin while the coffin enters the incinerator. The final scene opens with a black screen, with Ryoko’s voice asking: ‘If you could see some part of your life again, years after you die, which part would you choose?’ Hiroshi replies with a story that has obsessed him throughout the film, that of ‘the last images of the last Martian robot. Mankind’s final memory’. Ryoko gently rebukes him for not truly understanding the nature of her question. She then says: ‘as for me …’. The scene cuts to Hiroshi and Ryoko standing in the rain laughing. But we see only Hiroshi, blurred in a close-up shot. This is a point of view shot taken through Ryoko’s eyes, as it were, looking at Hiroshi. Ryoko says: ‘it smells wonderful’.

The materiality of mourning Vital portrays mourning experienced under unusual conditions. Whereas usually the physical body of the dead person is gone, here it is present. Hiroshi caresses Ryoko’s body, cuts it open, explores it. Her body is attended to in almost every scene in the film. Whereas usually we engage with the deceased through memory, here it is absent. To begin with Hiroshi cannot recall anything about the accident, and little about Ryoko. Thus the film presents to us a negation of mourning: instead of

242


a flood of memories and an absent body, here we have no memories and a present body. How does mourning take place under such conditions? In this chapter I will explore two trajectories of such mourning. The first is the epistemic process Hiroshi undergoes. In order to mourn Ryoko, he must first remember their shared past. His journey from epistemic impotence – complete amnesia – to fully recollecting their shared past and particularly the crash in which she died is also a journey of mourning. In order to mourn, a process of overcoming or forgetting (in some sense), Hiroshi must first remember. The film examines the roles memory and forgetfulness play in mourning. The second trajectory, is the haptic nature of Hiroshi’s mourning, paralleled by haptic cinematic techniques. Hiroshi’s mourning is a tactile engagement with Ryoko’s cadaver but also a process of reacquainting himself with the world. Two haptic processes take place in the film: one of closure, the other of opening up. The first process is Hiroshi’s gradual remembrance of Ryoko and their shared past through exploring her cadaver. This remembrance is a prelude to mourning, a process of closure and ending. The second is Hiroshi’s reunification with the world, which he must learn to inhabit anew after his accident. This is a process of regeneration and reparation. Throughout most of the film Hiroshi is bewildered, puzzled, overwhelmed by the world. Like the film itself, Hiroshi tries to make sense of the world by engaging with its textures, surfaces, images and colours. This process is depicted via a phenomenological study of Hiroshi’s movements, touch, hearing and reflection.3 This phenomenological focus is mirrored in the viewer’s reactions to the film. The film moves, touches, disgusts and awes the viewer in a process parallel to Hiroshi’s. Dissecting Ryoko’s physical body is not only a search for a cause of her death, but also a search for answers to metaphysical questions Hiroshi pursues throughout the film. Questions about the nature of consciousness, the ontological status of memories, and the relationship between mind and body are all part of his quest. Hiroshi, and other characters in the film, are also preoccupied with another key philosophical question about the nature of death and the transition from life to death. This transition is also a transition from sensual experience to its complete absence, and this is explored in the film in shots of a black screen, and with abrupt cuts and edits. These two trajectories, the epistemic and the haptic, are not separate. Vital’s edifying force arises from the inseparability of the intellectual, epistemic process and the haptic, sensual process. Both are tied together


243

in the human body, in which knowledge is always founded upon the sensual, and in which experience is not raw sense data, but meaningful engagement with the world. Moreover, a key condition for being able to meaningfully understand sensual experience arises from having a sense of perspective, a position and a body from which to look. The film contains shots of objects that leave us confused, because we do not know where we are looking from. We do not know if we are gazing through a telescope at an enormous planetary object, or through a microscope at a single cell. What enables us to understand and assign meaning to what we are looking at is the sense of perspective, distance and size, all of which are anchored in the human body. Thus the body is key to Vital’s ideas in several respects. It is the focus of study (the dissected body), of recovery (Hiroshi’s body after the accident), of love and lust (Ryoko’s body, both before and after the accident), and of knowledge (providing a perspective and size to the images). Looking without a body would be impossible, says Tsukamoto, and this lesson applies to the viewer as much as to the characters in the film. Thus the human body becomes not only the focal point of events in the film, but also a condition of possibility for viewing the film. This idea forcefully culminates in the film’s final shot, of Hiroshi seen as if from Ryoko’s eyes.4 This philosophical idea is expressed through a specific medium: cinema. I suggest that cinema is uniquely able to convey the relationship between the epistemic and the haptic, between knowledge and embodiment, through its ability to impart both intellectual knowledge and sensual experience, and moreover to synthesise the two. By showing how the two processes are linked Tsukamoto provides us with a view of the human body as a source of knowledge as well as sensuality, thus synthesising what Merleau-Ponty called the ‘intellectualist’ and ‘empiricist’ approaches into a third way (1962, p.98ff). As this chapter will show, the body as the locus of meaning, knowledge and mourning plays a central role in the film, as well as in the experience of viewing it.

From epistemic impotence to epistemic mastery The question of knowledge, in its many forms and domains, is central to the film. Tsukamoto is famous for his interest in the aberrant body: the dead body (Vital ), the body in pain (A Snake of June ( Japan, 2002)), the hybrid body (Tetsuo ( Japan, 1989)). I suggest that this interest should be understood within an epistemic context. In Vital in particular, but also in A Snake of June, the keen focus on the body is intimately linked with a quest for self-knowledge.

244


Vital shows us different kinds of knowledge which interweave throughout the film. First there is the complete absence of knowledge. The opening shot shows us amorphous and overlapping images to dissonant sounds. The images provide no sense of perspective or size. The dark sphere we see slowly rotating can equally be the earth or a tennis ball. Because of a lack of perspective and relationship to the object shown it is difficult to make out what it is that we are seeing and hearing. Although we are given sense data in the form of images and sounds, this is not enough. They have no meaning and no magnitude, because they lack a relationship to a human body. At this stage they are pure sensory input presented to the viewer with no interpretation. The epistemic impotence is not a result of a lack of sensory input, but a lack of meaning. As Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘Pure sensation would be the experience of an undifferentiated, instantaneous, dot-like impact... An isolated datum of perception is inconceivable’ (1962, pp.3, 4). The viewer’s state of complete lack of knowledge is analogous to Hiroshi’s bewilderment, whose face, whirling round and bandaged, appears next. We see Hiroshi lying in a hospital bed, after the car crash. He cannot recognise his own father and does not know where he is or what happened to him. Like the viewer, he, too, is epistemically impotent. This is Hiroshi’s starting point, from which he will begin his quest for knowledge and self-understanding. This quest takes us from theoretical to practical knowledge, then on to factual knowledge of one’s past, and finally to existential self-knowledge, which coincides with reparation at the end of the film. The first type of knowledge Hiroshi acquires is theoretical knowledge; textbook knowledge mastered in his medical studies. Next comes practical knowledge – knowledge of medical skills like dissection and cultivating bacteria in a Petri dish – in which Hiroshi excels. These kinds of knowledge are the first to be explored in the film and are phenomenologised by Tsukamoto’s camera work and lighting.5 When Hiroshi studies anatomy from a textbook, he does not merely look at the pages, he touches and caresses them. When he practices in the dissection room he does not treat the cadaver as a corpse, a source of emotional distress and stench, but as a locus of creativity. His beautiful anatomical sketches, reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci, bring to life the beauty and complexity of the human body, etched from the stillness of a corpse. 6 He touches the corpse, engages with it, deft with both pencil and knife. This practical, even artistic, view of dissection connects us to a unique view of the dead body. It is not merely a site for disgust and sorrow, but


245

a source of learning. For Hiroshi, who eventually realises he is dissecting Ryoko, the contact with the cadaver is sensual as well as epistemic. The connection of embodiment and knowledge brings Hiroshi to the next stage in his journey. Next comes the visceral knowledge of love, intimacy and lust, as experienced by Hiroshi and Ryoko, and also by Hiroshi and Ikumi. 7 As Hiroshi’s medical studies advance and as he recovers his memory we begin to see glimpses of this visceral knowledge. It is not a happy one. It bears the tones of adolescent first love, with all its pain and tempestuousness. But it is at the base of Hiroshi’s being and recovering his memories of being with Ryoko enables him, to some extent, to bond with Ikumi. We see Hiroshi lying in bed, less guarded and fragile. This is the first glimpse of his healing, symbolised by a more receptive, less numb Hiroshi. This visceral knowledge is introduced towards the middle of the film. At this stage, Hiroshi remembers Ryoko and their time together but he does not yet remember the crash. The flashback scenes are filled with references to a dream which Hiroshi cannot remember and talk of a science fiction story in which mankind has died out but succeeded in downloading its memories to robots. This science fiction story itself seems to function like a kind of downloading device for memories that Hiroshi is struggling to retrieve. This analogy is made clear only in the closing sequence of the film, to which I come later. The dissection scenes are not unlike a morbid yet sensual undressing of a lover. The more layers come off Ryoko’s body, the deeper into her flesh Hiroshi cuts, the more he knows her.8 But he has still not seen her face. The cadavers’ faces are covered in cloth. When the time comes to study the facial muscles, the instructor tells them to remove the cloth. We see Hiroshi slowly uncovering Ryoko’s face, and that is when he remembers the accident. The scene in which he recollects the accident begins with another memory. Hiroshi wakes up from sleep, and tries to remember his dream. This takes place in a complex flashback, which gives us content that is thus thrice removed from reality: Hiroshi is recollecting a moment in which he has woken up from sleep and tries to remember a dream that is itself unreal. Hiroshi’s attempt to recollect a recollection of something that is not real is later contrasted with the achingly real scenes of meeting Ryoko. Despite his father’s rebuke that these events must be memories, Hiroshi insists that these meetings are real; that he is spending time with, not remembering, Ryoko. In this insistence Hiroshi plays out a particular tension in the film, that between the experiential and emotional intensity of these scenes, which are also the most ontologically

246


ambiguous. The film seems to indicate that Hiroshi’s time with Ryoko, be it memory, fantasy, or a real encounter, is more vivid and significant than the other scenes, which are more ‘real’ but in which Hiroshi is emotionally and sensually numb. Just before this recollection scene begins, we see a close-up shot of a match being struck, briefly lighting the whole screen. When seen in real time, all we see is a flash illuminating our visual field, then disappearing. This is the flash of knowledge, at which Hiroshi finally remembers several things. He remembers the accident; he remembers what Ryoko said in the moments preceding it; and he remembers remembering his dream. Something inside him unravels at this moment. This elusive dream seems to somehow encompass the answer to his barely formulated questions about the nature of memory and its relationship to embodiment. We see Hiroshi driving a car with Ryoko sitting beside him. Ryoko asks what it would be like to die in a car crash. Hiroshi does not answer. A moment later he says: ‘I remembered the dream I had’, as he turns to Ryoko. It is at this moment that the accident starts, not when they hit the truck. A screeching sound startles us and we see Hiroshi, frozen, and Ryoko, calmly looking at the windscreen, as a truck veers towards them. The terrible noise continues and the screen turns to black and white images. We see Hiroshi on the ground, struggling to get up. We do not see Ryoko. This pivotal scene immediately cuts to an outdoors scene filmed in natural light. The lush, green, exterior and the bright daylight sharply contrast with the preceding black and white scene, as well as the colour register used previously (which will be examined below). We see Ryoko moving in a graceful slow-motion dance. We then see Hiroshi and Ryoko naked, hugging, the distance between them removed for the first time in the film. Although Hiroshi has several flashbacks of him with Ryoko, this is the first time that they are truly reunited. And the reunion is made possible by Hiroshi becoming able to connect with something inside him that he has been resisting so far: his grief. His ability to remember is also what enables him to mourn.9 This leads us to the final type of knowledge portrayed in the film, existential or self-knowledge. This knowledge is linked to metaphysical knowledge. Hiroshi’s quest to understand Ryoko’s death is a quest for all three: for emotional knowledge (the ability to mourn), for selfknowledge (knowing whether he is responsible for her death and what he wants) and for metaphysical knowledge (understanding the link between consciousness and embodiment, or remembering his ‘dream’).


247

Ryoko’s lifeless, broken body is a source of metaphysical insight. Indeed, Tsukamoto’s inspiration for the film was a period of illness, which gave rise to a metaphysical question about the mind/ body relationship. He says: ‘It was a scary experience because it was almost as if my body was dead, while my brain was fully alive and functioning. That was actually the source of inspiration for Vital, the idea that consciousness can survive inside a lifeless body’ (Mes, 2005, p.185).

Colours of grief In terms of colour and lighting, the film is divided into ‘blue’, ‘red’, ‘yellow’ and ‘natural light’ scenes. These roughly correlate with the three dimensions of Hiroshi’s grief. We see epistemic, blue scenes, in which Hiroshi tries to understand something intellectually. These scenes are both aesthetically pure and emotionally sterile. Blue here is the colour of disembodied intellectual understanding, mediated by computer screens, windows and an ultra-modern urban landscape. There are emotive red scenes, in which Hiroshi makes existential and emotional progress. These scenes show us Hiroshi engaging in acts of self-understanding, or conversing with others in a face-to-face direct way. There are also many yellow scenes; all located in the dissection room, evoking the formaldehyde-drenched rooms full of cadavers and deprived of natural daylight. Yellow here is the colour of death and decay, of artificial preserving of dead flesh. And finally, there are a handful of scenes shot in natural light and outdoors, in which Hiroshi spends time with Ryoko dancing on the beach, watching the sunset by a river, and sleeping in the sun. While visually ‘natural’ these scenes are existentially synthetic, in which intellect and emotion, concepts and sensual information, merge. The natural light enables us to see all colours, and vitally the relationship between them; we see shots of red flowers, greenery, blue water, orange sunset, pale sand. In the same way that the natural light enables us to see the different colours, the synthesis of intellectualism and empiricism enables a new notion of the human being to emerge, perhaps in what Stanley Cavell might call the film’s rediscovery of the ordinary. The synthesis is double here. First, the empiricist insistence on the significance of sensory information is unified with the intellectualist emphasis on concepts and reason, to create a sophisticated view of perception. Second, mind and body are reunited in these scenes, in which sensuality of vision, touch, eroticism and sound overcomes the prior separation of mind and body. It is the haptic nature of these scenes, infused with sensuality and

248


eros, which displays the centrality of perception and the unified view of mind and body. We can also think of the scenes’ intentional object as erotic – the living body of Ryoko, as opposed to her cadaver. This use of colour also serves to illustrate the changing relationship between the people in the film and their environment. Greg Tuck has written about the use of monochrome tint in another Tsukamoto film, A Snake of June. Tuck writes: ‘A phenomenological consequence of this surface wash is to make flesh and world merge such that these characters are not simply in the city but of it, creating an entwined complex of the natural and the man made, the-flesh-of-the-world’ (2005, p.51). We see this intimate link between environment and people in Vital as well. The blue, red and yellow permeate not just the spaces, furniture and buildings, but also the people shown in these scenes. They become infused by and washed with the colour, which serves both to connect them to their environment and to set them in a certain mood. What the blue, red and yellow scenes have in common is that they are all scenes of an urban environment and constrained spaces. Hiroshi moves within and touches buildings, walls, concrete, glass and metal. He is constrained by his environment, numbed by it, and his behaviour is careful, restrained. Many of the scenes show him in an enclosed space: his room in his parents’ house, his cell-like flat, the dissection room, hospital corridors. In the few scenes in which he is outdoors he is angularly framed by modern office buildings, or in a car. When he is walking outside there is a sense of being overwhelmed by the urban environment, the noise, traffic and structures that surround him. These mise-en-scènes contrast strongly with the natural light scenes. These scenes were filmed outdoors, first in an unfinished concrete skeleton of a building, with lush greenery and waterfall as nature invading the man-made building. Later on we see Hiroshi and Ryoko meet in idealised spaces of nature: sitting by a river, dancing on the beach, making love in the sun. The contrast between the constricted urban space, within which movement and emotion are stifled, and the utopian beauty of nature in which one becomes free, is accentuated by the locations chosen by Tsukamoto. The hospital scenes were shot in an abandoned hospital in Yokohama and the sense of dereliction contributes to the cellar-like feel. The utopian scenes were filmed in the subtropical Okinawa archipelago, where Tsukamoto travelled as a youth (Mes, 2005, pp.188–90). But the scenes are not purely blue, red or yellow. Often they cross over and cut into one another. For example, the scene of the first meeting between Hiroshi and Ryoko’s parents is a blue scene. Hiroshi has come


249

to understand how Ryoko’s cadaver ended up on his dissection table. They begin by sitting down and speaking quietly to each other. But before long Ryoko’s father becomes agitated and stands up. At that point we see a big red building through the window by which he is standing, introducing an element of emotion to the scene. Seconds later the father explodes in great anger, as the full perversity of the situation sinks in. Thus the different types of scenes also offer a typology of grief – anger (red), numbness (blue), obsession (yellow). Did she really love me? Did I treat her well? Was it my fault? These are the kinds of questions that emerge in mourning. Within the sea of grief there is always also a kernel of doubt that arouses complex, ambivalent emotion (cf. Carel 2007). The dialogue with the dead person continues (indeed, sometimes begins) after their death and often opens questions and arouses emotions, so that mourning continues and transforms the relationship with the dead person. This dialogue and its movement towards closure are portrayed in the natural light scenes, which are all rehearsals of a final goodbye. In each of these scenes one of the two lovers leaves. First we see Ryoko disappearing and Hiroshi waking up and looking for her. Later we see Hiroshi telling Ryoko he must go. Despite her begging, he walks away from her. These scenes are melancholy, but also infused with vitality and tenderness absent from the rest of the film. Despite being accentuated in emotional tone (emphasised by guitar music), colour and lighting, their ambiguous ontological status remains unresolved. Are these scenes real? Are they memories or fantasies? Hiroshi insists that the scenes are real; his father says they are simply his memories coming back to him. There is a real tension between the ambiguous status of these scenes and their intense nature. Their completeness and harmony stand in stark contrast to the rest of the film. The final scene shows Hiroshi standing in the rain laughing. Uniquely, in it we see Hiroshi from Ryoko’s point of view. He is standing so close that his image is slightly blurred and the rain pounds unnaturally loud. The shot cuts to darkness and we hear Ryoko saying: ‘it smells wonderful’. The end of Hiroshi’s epistemic journey is one of reparation. Hiroshi is now able to let go, to allow the natural light scenes to end. They do not end in sorrow, but in a happy image of intimacy. And, significantly, it ends with an evocation of the senses: the wetness of rain, the sound of raindrops and voices, the serene daylight, and the wonderful smell of rain. The film ends in reparation, but interestingly, reparation takes place via Ryoko, the dead, not Hiroshi, the living. The question remains: reparation for whom? Is the scene ‘for’ Hiroshi, a ‘downloaded’ memory which he can treasure, a sense of peace he has made with her absence

250


and memory? Or is the scene for us – a conclusion, or closure? And why does Ryoko talk about the smell of rain, a sense modality that is absent in film? We can think of smell as haptic as well; a more ambient sense of touch, which brings into contact tissue surface and molecules of the substance being smelled. In smell the two come into contact, even if less obviously than in touch. The use of smell seems to deliberately evoke something that cannot be experienced cinematically in the way vision can. We can now turn to the gloves and masks the medical students are required to wear in the dissection class. They wear masks when handling the cadavers so as to restrict the sense of smell, just as the gloves restrict the sense of touch, leaving them with the more cerebral sense of sight. The gloves and mask and Hiroshi’s refusal to wear them as a way of retaining a haptic openness to the world lead us to Tsukamoto’s haptic cinema.

The sense of the world: haptic cinema The film focuses on the haptic qualities of relationships, between bodies and other bodies, bodies and their environment and between the viewer and the film. As such, it is a film about touch and somatic sensing. About touching textures and surfaces, touching other people, touching bodies that are dead or alive, and ultimately touching death. It is also a film about bodily spatiality and the sense of locatedness and perspective it provides. Spatiality, place and distance play an important role in the visual spaces so prominent in the film. As I discussed earlier, most of the film is shot indoors, in restricted urban spaces. Hiroshi repeatedly touches the boundaries of his space – he touches the ceiling, the wall, the wood panel, he lies and sits on the floor, as if examining and internalising the spatial limits of his situation. The previous section examined the epistemic trajectory of Hiroshi’s mourning. But what is unique to Tsukamoto’s perspective is the sensuality of knowledge. No medium can enact this sensuality better than cinema. Through medium-specific techniques the film shows the various sensual acts of knowledge Hiroshi performs: he touches and cuts the cadaver of Ryoko in order to discover the cause of her death; he smells the cadaver; he looks at and touches buildings, textures and surfaces; he feels the coldness and wetness of water (rain, drainpipe water, sea water, river water); he experiences strangulation in his love-games; he looks at himself in the mirror; he reads books; he sketches and draws. All of these sensual acts stand at the basis of his quest for embodied knowledge, as well as at the basis of our relationship to the flesh of the film.


251

In many shots the camera zooms in on a surface, as if touching, or trying to touch, it. In an early red scene we see Hiroshi looking at a red wood panel. He looks at it, the camera looks at it, the camera closes in on the red panel, swirls of colour come closer and closer. The shot cuts to Hiroshi getting up and walking towards the panel and physically touching it, moving it. Behind it is a box marked with an ‘x’. The box contains his medical textbooks. The process of investigating by zooming in continues: Hiroshi opens a book and the camera zooms in on the pages, as if trying to touch them. Hiroshi mirrors the camera movement by running his hand down a sketch of a human head, laterally cut, to show the structure of an ear. In this scene we experience looking, touching and hearing as they come together in haptic synthesis. We see Hiroshi opening himself up to embodiment, getting back in touch with his body, his habits, the sensuality of life. He is recovering his memory of self and his self narrative through touch. Hapticity is not limited to touch. It is more accurate to see it as a system of internally felt sensations that are distinct from the culturally sedimented model of five discrete senses (Paterson 2009, p.768). Some current researchers prefer the collective term ‘somatic senses’, a term which acknowledges the multiplicity and interaction between internally felt and outwardly oriented senses (ibid.). Thus we see Hiroshi employing different bodily modalities in a variety of contexts, each presenting to the viewer (and listener) a different mode of sensual exploration of the world. For example, the scene that immediately succeeds the wood panel scene is set in the medical school admissions centre. We hear the bustle of the centre, but when Hiroshi goes into a bathroom and shuts the door, silence returns. He looks at himself in the mirror, unsure about what he is seeing, and says to himself quietly: ‘huh, huh’, as if to check the effect and resonance of his speech and hearing.10 The most iconoclastic form of touching is also the one that is featured in the most detail: touching a dead body. Lengthy scenes in the dissection room portray the many ways in which a dead body can be touched. We see dead bodies being cut, bones sawed, fat scraped, skin peeled, eyeballs emptied. There are two types of touching here: objective (or medical) and subjective. The two types of touching are distinguished by the use of disposable gloves. Most of the students use the gloves throughout. Hiroshi and Ikumi resist the gloves, for different reasons. Initially Hiroshi uses the gloves. He confidently, almost violently takes the scalpel and is the first to cut into the cadaver laid out in front of him. But, once he realises whose cadaver he is dissecting, he removes

252


the gloves and changes his touch. In an earlier scene we saw him cutting open a tattooed arm. Now he gently touches the tattooed arm, trying to seal the cut he has made in the flesh. A sense of reparation pervades the scene, created both by the removal of the gloves and by the attempt to close the wound. We can add to this the intense sketching scenes we see later in the film. Hiroshi has wanted to be an artist before going to medical school and in one flashback scene we see Ryoko looking at his drawings. Hiroshi says ‘I thought I would get something out of painting, but I didn’t.’ Ryoko replies: ‘they look real. As for me, I’m not sure if I am real. It’s like I’m sleeping and dreaming’. This scene poignantly poses the question of Ryoko’s being for Hiroshi: she is dead, but also very much alive. She appears in fantasies, dreams, hallucinations, but these hallucinations feel more real than the rest of Hiroshi’s life, which he lives out in a numb and desensitised state. But in order for Hiroshi to touch Ryoko, he must touch her corpse. He cannot touch the living woman who is no longer there to be touched. The same structure of representation thrice removed from reality is echoed here: Ryoko doubts her own existence in a flashback scene, presented in a film. Add to this Hiroshi’s frequent failure to remember, especially being unable to remember his dream, the frequent melding together of waking and dreaming, ‘reel’ life and fantasy, and we find that the same epistemic impotence with which we began engulfs the entire film. This is emphasised in a scene where we see Hiroshi dissecting again, obsessively, while all the other students have finished their work and gone. Hiroshi’s sketches dissolve into a shot of rain against window pane, the rain looking like black ink dripping down the walls. We then get a short sequence repeating the opening shots, of Hiroshi’s face and something moving – is it tissue? Cells? The epistemic impotence with which the film opens is reasserted at this point, mirroring Hiroshi’s impotence with respect to Ryoko’s death. All the scientific dissection work will not bring her back to life. Ikumi’s stance, as a participant in a love triangle involving a corpse, also forces her to move beyond the medical touch. Initially, Ikumi is the top student in the class. She delivers a confident speech, about the body as an antenna. But when the class begins the dissection training, Ikumi is unable to perform the required actions. She is seen several times leaving the dissection room, running to the bathroom feeling sick, looking pale and unwell. Ikumi is unable to engage with the touching of bodies in a medical, objective touch. The other students mock her, and eventually Ikumi dons a mask and visor. The gloves represent a form of engagement that is one of


253

objective distance. Despite the closeness, the actual touching implied by the use of the gloves, is distant, uninvolved. This is the nature of medical touching: proximity is great but dissector and cadaver are not close. The glove is also a figure for the distance separating Ikumi from Hiroshi and his quest to ‘touch’ the departed presence of Ryoko. Hiroshi wants to touch the dead Ryoko without gloves but is unable to touch Ikumi with his bare hands, at least in the way she would like him to touch her.

Conclusion: the vital body The materiality of mourning, or the relationship of Hiroshi and Ryoko that extends beyond her death while her physical body is still present, demonstrate the ineptitude of the mind/body split through which we usually think about mourning. We normally think about mourning as being a purely psychological process. But the thought experiment presented in the film confronts us with an alternative possibility – of mourning done in the material presence of the deceased.11 The mind/ body split has been the focus of extensive critique by the phenomenological tradition, especially by Merleau-Ponty. On this view, splitting the human being into a mind and a body, as two separate substances, mis-describes what it is to be human and the holistic and embodied features of human existence, which is neither purely physical nor purely mental, but always a synthesis of the two. It also suggests that such a split necessarily distorts that which it purports to explain. Thus Merleau-Ponty does not merely propose a synthesis of mind and body but a synthesis that rejects the existence of mind and body in the first place, and instead prioritises being as a third type of thing. The film provides a scenario in which this split is questioned and the importance of this synthesis is enacted in the natural light scenes. Over the period depicted in the film we see two processes: Hiroshi recovers his memory and goes through a process of mourning and (partial) recovery. The two seemingly opposed processes – trying to remember what he has forgotten and being urged to forget what he can finally remember – are tied together in Ryoko’s corpse, which is seen initially as an enigma, a lifeless reminder of trauma, but as the film progresses, comes alive in myriad ways. This transition from corpse to lived experience is the phenomenological movement from the physical, and in this case lifeless, body, to the body as lived. Significantly, in the natural light scenes Ryoko is depicted as a dancer, something she was not in her life. The scenes in which she is dancing reiterate and emphasise that Hiroshi remembers her as an intentional, vital body.

254


Thus we can see that the two trajectories explored above – the epistemic and the haptic – are not separate strands in Vital. They ultimately come together in the lived body, the one which gives rise to perception and understanding. The body also gives rise to the sense of perspective, which is so essential to making sense of perception. If we return to the name of the film – Vital – this encapsulates the view of the body that Tsukamoto is ultimately pointing us towards. Not disembodied knowledge, nor merely a physical body, the vital body is one that combines both facets and moreover enlivens us to movement and touch.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Greg Tuck, Mark Bould, Jeremy Dunham, Robert Sinnerbrink and Andrew McGettigan for helpful comments on the chapter.

Notes 1. I am grateful to Greg Tuck for introducing me to Tsukamoto’s work and for spending many hours discussing Vital, phenomenology and film with me. 2. As Andrew McGettigan suggests (private communication) there is a similar trope in some horror films. It is clear in those contexts that keeping the body or parts of the bodies is a marker of perversity (most famously, the mummified mother in Psycho or the wearing of others’ skin in Texas Chainsaw Massacre). As I hope will become clear, Vital’s aesthetic and emotive attunement manages this issue in a very different manner. 3. This trajectory of Vital may remind us of another phenomenologically and emotionally rich exploration of grief, Pedro Almodovar’s Todo sobre mi Madre, in which the figure of organ transplantation enacts a kind of material gift or transmigration that fosters mourning and reconciliation between characters, pasts, and worlds. I am grateful to Robert Sinnerbrink for making this connection. 4. This same phenomenological technique is also used in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly to express the perspective (lying down) the proximity of others (too close) and the absence of motility of the main character, Jean-Dominique Bauby, who becomes completely paralysed after a stroke. 5. Tsukamoto was director of photography and editor of Vital. 6. Tsukamoto was inspired by da Vinci’s sketches in the making of Vital and had the words ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ written on his copy of the shooting script (Mes, p.186). 7. Tsukamoto’s taste for love triangles, which play a central role in Snake of June and Tokyo Fist, is apparent here too. 8. Tsukamoto comments on this when he discusses selecting an actress for the role of Ryoko. He says it was not easy to find someone who would agree to have a full body cast made and then used throughout the film (Mes, p.188).


255

9. In an earlier scene we see Hiroshi going to visit Ryoko’s parents. Her father says to him: “if you want to mourn her, do it when you truly remember her”. 10. This action is repeated after Hiroshi first sees Ryoko’s cadaver in the dissection room. 11. Some mourning practices, like the Catholic open casket ceremony and the Irish wake, echo this idea.

References Carel H., 2007. ‘Mourning Terminable and Interminable’. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 88(4):1071–82. Deleuze, G. & Guattari F., 1988. A Thousand Plateaus. London: Continuum. Merleau-Ponty M., 1962 [1945]. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. C. Smith. New York and London: Routledge. Mes T., 2005. Iron Man: The Cinema of Shinya Tsukamoto. Godalming: FAB Press. Paterson M., 2009. ‘Haptic Geographies: Ethnography, Haptic Knowledges and Sensuous Dispositions’. Progress in Human Geography 33(6):766–88. Tuck G., 2007. Sex with the City: Urban Spaces, Sexual Encounters and Erotic Spectacle in Tsukamoto Shinya’s Rokugatsu no Hebi – A Snake of June (2003). Film Studies 11:49–60.

Filmography The Diving Bell and the Butterfly ( Julian Schnabel, France, 2007). Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, US, 1960). A Snake of June (Shinya Tsukamoto, Japan, 2002). Tetsuo (Shinya Tsukamoto, Japan, 1989). The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, US, 1974). Todo sobre mi Madre (Pedro Almodovar, Spain/France, 1999). Tokyo Fist (Shinya Tsukamoto, Japan, 1989). Vital (Shinya Tsukamoto, Japan, 2004).

Index Smiles of a Summer Night/ Sommarnattens Leende, 29 Bergson, Henri, 29, 90, 93, 94, 96, 160 Bersani, Leo & Dutoit, Ulysse, 38–41, 44n.1, 45n.12 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 10 Conformist (I & II), The, /Il Conformista, 10 Bordwell, David, 30, 42, 94, 117 Bradley, F.H., 92 Bradshaw, Peter, 226

Adorno, Theodor, 2, 3, 44, 65–85, 97, 99, 236 Akerman, Chantal, 73 The Meetings of Anna/Les Rendez-Vous d’Anna, 74 Alfredson, Tomas, 237n.8 Låt den rätte komma in/Let the Right One in, 237n.8 Alien films, The, 13, 14, 18, 26, 32, 44n.11, 122–3, 123 Allen, Woody, 19 Crimes and Misdemeanors, 19 Almódovar, Pedro, 38, 254n.3 Todo Sobre Mi Madre, 38–9, 254n.3 Anderson, Paul Thomas, 122 Punch Drunk Love, 122 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 29, 71–6, 83n.9 L’Avventura, 29 L’Eclisse, 71–6, 82 La Notte, 83n.9 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 159, 160, 161 Aristotle, 158, 162, 215, 235, 236n.2 Austen, Jane, 126, 129–30 Bachelard, Gaston, 198, 204 Baggini, Julian, 5, 32 Ballard, J.G., 5, 135–53 Barthes, Roland, 191, 199, 203, 226–7, 230, 232, 235 Baudrillard, Jean, 5, 135–53 Beckett, Samuel, 33, 44, 229 Film, 33, 44 Bekmambetov, Timur, 4, 103 Wanted, 4, 103–16 Benjamin, Walter, 52–3, 63n.10, 82, 166–7, 228, 231, 235 Bergman, Ingmar, 29, 68, 72, 80, 81, 83n.6 Hour of the Wolf/Vargtimmen, 83n.6 Persona, 68–9, 71–5, 77, 80, 82, 83n.6, n.13

Capra, Frank, 51–2, 55 It Happened One Night, 51, 55 Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, 49 Carel, Havi, 6, 45n.14 Carroll, Nöel, 30, 31, 42, 117, 120–121, 202 Cavell, Stanley, 2, 3, 13, 23n.3, 29–31, 39, 41, 43, 44n.1, 48–64, 67, 87, 88, 95, 99n.5, 247 Chalmers, David, 23n.8 Cinematic Philosophy Thesis, The, 9–23 Clover, Carol, 229–30, 234 Coen Brothers, The, 5, 207–22 A Serious Man, 219–20 Barton Fink, 211–16, 217 Big Lebowski, The, 211, 215, 217 Burn after Reading, 5, 218–19, 221 Fargo, 216–17, 218 Intolerable Cruelty, 213 Ladykillers, The, 213 Man Who Wasn’t There, The, 217 No Country for Old Men, 5, 217–18, 219 Columbus, Christopher, 228 Home Alone, 228 Conan Doyle, Arthur, 58–60 Coole, Diana, 67, 73, 83n.5 Craven, Wesley, 123 Scream, 123 Critchley, Simon, 26, 44n.7

256

Index Cronenberg, David, 135–52 Crash, 135–52 Curtis, Richard, 88 Love Actually, 88 Danto, Arthur, 25, 33, 34–5 Debray, Régis, 155, 156, 160 Demme, Jonathan Silence of the Lambs, 123 Descartes, René, 19, 20–21, 32, 210 Deleuze, Gilles, 23n.2, 28, 29–31, 44n.1, 78, 83n.12, 86–8, 89, 94, 98, 240 Dick, Philip, K. 140–1, 142 Donner, Richard, 237n.7 Superman: The Movie, 237n.7 Duras, Marguerite, 29 Hiroshima Mon Amour, 29 Edison, Thomas Alva, 159–61, 166 Eldridge, Richard, 10, 17, 20 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 29, 57, 58 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 68, 74 In a Year with 13 Moons/ In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden, 68, 71, 72, 74, 82 Ford, Hamish, 3–4, 82n.1, 83n.11, 225, 232 Frampton, Daniel, 9, 26, 44n.1, 87–8, 209 Frankfurt School, The, 65, 67, 82 (see also Adorno) Freud, Sigmund, 53–5, 58, 59, 144 Ginzburg, Carlo, 59–60, 62n.7 Glendinning, Simon, 56–8 Godard, Jean-Luc, 27–8, 38–40, 41, 44, 45n.13, 68, 71–2, 74, 78–82, 83n.12, 86 Le Mépris, 38–40, 44n.2, 45n.13 Two or Three Things I Know About Her/2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle, 71–7, 78–82 Vivre sa Vie, 27–8, 41 Goldman, William, 90, 99n.2 Gondry, Michel, 17 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 17–18 Gunning, Tom, 117

257

Habermas, Jürgen, 67 Hamer, Robert, 228 Kind Hearts and Coronets, 228 Haneke, Michael, 5–6, 43, 68, 71, 86–7, 89, 223–39 Caché/Hidden, 68, 72, 78, 81–2, 86–7, 89 Code Unknown/Code Inconnu, 86–7 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls/71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, 71, 236n.236 Funny Games/Ölümcül oyunlar, 5–6, 223–39 Seventh Continent, The/Der Siebente Kontinent, 71, 74, 75–7, 81 Haptic, 240, 242–3, 247–8, 250–4 Heidegger, Martin, 38–39, 44.n.11, 44–45n.12, 48, 91–92, 120, 164, 168n.7 Hegel, 67, 82–3n.4, 97, 99n.7 Hitchcock, Alfred, 29, 228 Rear Window, 228 Ihde, Don, 194–5, 199, 200–1 203–4 Intentional Stance, The, 207–9 Jarman, Derek, 5, 191–206 Blue, 5, 191–206 Kant, Immanuel, 14–15, 61, 164, 224 Kaprow, Allan, 93 Keathley, Christian, 52–55 Kittler, Friedrich, A., 155–66, 167–8n.4, 168n.6 Knight, Deborah, 19–20 Kompridis, Nikolas, 29, 36–7 Kracauer, Sigfried, 30, 82n.1, 83n.3, 165, 224 Kubrick, Stanley, 229 A Clockwork Orange, 229 Lamorisse, Albert, 234 Crinc Blanc, 234 Laruelle, François, 4, 89–90, 91, 93, 97, 99n.1 Lee, Ang, 127 Sense and Sensibility, 127–32

258

Index

Levinas, Emmanuel, 57, 86–7, 89, 215 Linklatter, Richard, 10 Waking Life, 10 Livingston, Paisley, 12–13, 23n.2, 44n.6, 72 Lumières, 162, 179 Arivée d’un train en gare á La Ciotat, 179 Lynch, David, 33, 45n.13 Mulholland Drive, 45n.13 Lyotard, Jean-François, 83n.8, 86 Mackendrick, Alexander, 228 The Ladykillers, 228 Malick, Terrence, 33, 38, 43, 44–5n.12 The Thin Red Line, 38–39, 44–5n.12 McGettigan, Andrew, 5–6, 94–8, 99n.7, 254n.2 McLuhan, Marshall, 157, 163, 164 McNaughton, John, 228 Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, 228 Mai, Joseph, 96–7 Makavejev, Dušan, 74 Sweet Movie, 74 Marx, Karl, 67 Marxism, 28, 30, 35, 82n.1, 83n.7 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 2, 5, 171–87, 191, 192, 193, 199, 243, 244, 253 Minnelli, Vincente, 60 Band Wagon, The, 60–1 Mulhall, Stephen, 4, 13, 14, 17, 18, 26, 44n.1, n.11, 207, 209, 211, 220 Münsterberg, Hugo, 30 Photoplay, The, 30

Letter From an Unknown Woman/ Brief einer Unbekannten, 49 Paradigm Shift (Thomas Kuhn), 158–60 Parain, Brice, 27–8, 44n.2 Parker, Alan, 122 Angel Heart, 122 Pascal’s wager, 230, 236n.5 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 225 Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, 225 Phenomenology, 2,5, 33, 38, 120, 126, 155, 171–87, 191–206, 225, 240–55 Plato, 16, 18, 19, 20, 31, 32, 34, 49, 156, 162–4, 208 The Allegory of the Cave, 6, 10, 20, 34–5, 49 Poe, Edgar Allan, 58 Ponech, Trevor, 21 Powell, Michael, 229 Peeping Tom, 229 Prinz, Jesse, 118–19

Narboni, Jean, 69 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 18, 29, 67, 154–5, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167n.1 Non-Philosophy, 31, 86–99 Nussbaum, Martha, 118

Rancière, Jacques, 31–2 Rapper, Irving, 50–1 Now, Voyager, 50–2, 56 Reiner, Carl, 14 All of Me, 14 Renoir, Jean, 49 Rules of the Game/La Règle du jeu, 49 Resnais, Alain, 29, 40, 71, 88 Hiroshima Mon Amour, 29 L’Année dernière à Marienbad/Last Year at Marienbad, 71, 74, 88 Richardson, Tony, 226 Tom Jones, 226 Robinson, Jenefer, 118–19 Rodowick, D.N., 30 Romanticism, 29, 36–44, 49, 79, 131 Romantic Film-Philosophy, 3, 26, 29, 25–45 Rushton, Richard, 95–6 Russell, Bertrand, 160–1 Russell, Bruce, 15, 23n.7

Oldman, Gary, 227–8 Nil by Mouth, 227–8 Ophuls, Max, 49

Schlegel, Friedrich, 25 Scott, Ridley, 18, 32, 44, 122, 125 Blade Runner, 125, 126

Index Shakespeare, William, 154–5 Sherlock Holmes, 58–9 Shaviro, Steven, 23n.5 de Sica, Vittorio, 88 Ladri di Biciclette, 88 Silverman, Kaja, 44–5n.12 Simmel, Georg, 165 Sinclair, Iain, 136–7, 146–7 Sinnerbrink, Robert, 3, 93–5, 97–8, 254 Smith, George Albert, 171–3, 178–82, 186–7, 187, n.1 The Kiss in the Tunnel, 171–3, 178–82, 187, n.1 Smith, Murray, 9, 12, 13–14, 19–20, 31, 32, 42, 120, 122 Sobchack, Vivien, 5, 139–40, 142, 143, 145, 185–6 Solomon, Robert, 10, 118 Spielberg, S., 123–15 Jaws, 123–5 Jurassic Park, 123 War of the Worlds, 123 Tarrantino, Quentin, 237n.9 Reservoir Dogs, 237n.9 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 234 Solaris, 234 Three Musketeers, The, 27

259

Tuck, Greg, 23n.10, 62–3n.9, 82–82n.4, 99n.4, 240, 248 Tsukamoto, Shinya, 6, 240–55 A Snake of June/Rokugatsu no hebi, 243–4, 248 Tetsuo, 243 Vital, 6, 240–55 Vidor, King, 95 Stella Dallas, 49, 95–6 Wachowski, Andrew & Larry, 12, 32 Matrix films, The, 12, 18–19, 23n.8, 32, 33 Walton, K, 128, 130 Warhol, Andy, 21 Empire, 21 Warner, Marina, 156–63, 167n.4 Wartenberg, Thomas, 3, 25, 31, 32, 44n.3 Wheatley, Catherine, 223–4, 227 Williams, John, 123, 124 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 3, 29, 48–59, 87, 88, 93, 208, 220–1 Wood, Sam, 52 A Night at the Opera, 52 Žižek, Slavoj, 86, 89, 94, 227

New Takes in Film-Philosophy

Terror Takes Seven

Jeeves Takes Charge

It Takes a Witch

Shopaholic Takes Manhattan

Scandal Takes a Holiday

Gentleman Takes a Chance

Biggles Takes a Holiday

Kitty Takes a Holiday

A Ship Takes Shape

Winner Takes All

Winner Takes All

Shopaholic Takes Manhattan

Biggles Takes The Case

It Takes a Thief

Scandal Takes a Holiday

Kitty Takes a Holiday

Scandal Takes a Holiday

It Takes A Thief

How Racism Takes Place

It Takes A Hero

Devil Takes A Bride

Devil Takes A Bride

Winner Takes All

Winner Takes All

Shopaholic Takes Manhattan

Every Breath She Takes

Murder Takes No Holiday

Death Takes a Honeymoon

Murder Takes the Cake

Shopaholic Takes Manhattan

New Takes in Film-Philosophy

Terror Takes Seven

Jeeves Takes Charge

It Takes a Witch

Shopaholic Takes Manhattan

Scandal Takes a Holiday

Gentleman Takes a Chance

Biggles Takes a Holiday

Kitty Takes a Holiday

A Ship Takes Shape

Winner Takes All

Winner Takes All

Shopaholic Takes Manhattan

Biggles Takes The Case

It Takes a Thief

Scandal Takes a Holiday

Kitty Takes a Holiday

Scandal Takes a Holiday

It Takes A Thief

How Racism Takes Place

It Takes A Hero

Devil Takes A Bride

Devil Takes A Bride

Winner Takes All

Winner Takes All

Shopaholic Takes Manhattan

Every Breath She Takes

Murder Takes No Holiday

Death Takes a Honeymoon

Murder Takes the Cake

Shopaholic Takes Manhattan

Recommend Documents